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British Colonial Rule in SubSaharan Africa (African Studies)

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Jun 17th, 2017
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  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. The British Empire in Africa went through several distinct phases. From the heyday of the Atlantic slave trade to the mid-19th century, the British imperial presence was limited to a small handful of trading forts on the West African coast, the seizure of the Cape Colony from the Dutch, and a protectorate over the Sultanate of Zanzibar. Britain acquired its substantial African holdings during the era of “new imperialism” of the late 19th century, when it played a substantial role in the European conquest and partition of the continent. While British Africa may have appeared ordered and coherent from London, where a pinkish red usually marked its component territories on maps of the empire, it was in fact a highly diverse and varied entity. Empires, by their very nature, embody and institutionalize difference. Moreover, they are hierarchical institutions that appear quite different from the perspective of the metropole, a colonial capital, and local subject communities. In the decades before the First World War, British Africa included protectorates over theoretically sovereign states, a handful of West African coastal enclaves with Crown Colony status, settler colonies, the self-governing dominion of South Africa, and territories governed by anachronistic charter companies that belonged to an earlier imperial era. While there were small but politically influential communities of European descent in eastern, central, and southern Africa, the vast majority of Britain’s subjects in Africa were Africans. According to the widely accepted stereotypes of the new imperialism, Britain had a moral responsibility to govern these subject peoples because they were at a less advanced stage of human development. This doctrine of trusteeship became harder to justify as social Darwinism went out of fashion over the course of the 20th century, and it proved incompatible with institutionalized racial discrimination in the settler colonies and policies that privileged British economic interests. These realities explain why much of the literature on British Africa appears contradictory, for historians writing about imperial topics are often writing about very different things. The substantial diversity and variety in the form and function of British rule has made it difficult for historians to draw broad conclusions about Britain’s African empire. See also the related Oxford Bibliographies articles on German Colonial Rule and Belgian Colonial Rule.
  4.  
  5. General Overviews
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  7. Most general surveys that pay substantive attention to British Africa are histories of either the entire British Empire or Africa in general. Eldridge 1984 and Hyam 2002 are broad histories of the British Empire that pay good attention to Africa. For an in-depth examination of why Britain took part in the new imperialism, which included the conquest of Africa, see Cain and Hopkins 1993. For a dated but still informative overview of British rule in Africa see the two edited collections, Gifford and Louis 1967 and Gifford and Louis 1971. Hyam 2006 is a good introductory history of the British Empire’s demise that pays sufficient attention to the African colonies.
  8.  
  9. Cain, P. J. and A. G. Hopkins. British Imperialism. 2 vols. London: Longman, 1993.
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  11. This highly influential survey of British imperial history attributes Britain’s imperial expansion to an alliance between landed aristocrats and London bankers and businessmen. Vol 1, Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914; Vol 2, Crisis and Deconstruction, 1914–1990.
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  13. Eldridge, C. C., ed. British Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century. New York: St. Martin’s, 1984.
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  15. A collection of introductory essays on British Empire building in the 19th century.
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  17. Gifford, Prosser, and William Roger Louis, eds. Britain and Germany in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967.
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  19. This collection of essays resulted from the first of a series of scholarly conferences, organized by the noted historian William Roger Louis, which examined various aspects of European imperial rule in Africa. The chapters cover Anglo-German imperial competition and cooperation, comparisons of German and British colonial policies regarding “native administration,” missions, taxation, and the British acquisition of some of Germany’s African colonies after World War I.
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  21. Gifford, Prosser, and William Roger Louis, eds. France and Britain in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971.
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  23. Gifford and Louis’s sequel to Britain and Germany in Africa 1967, this collection compares British and French colonial policy in Africa. Topics include the French and British imperial rivalry, comparative systems of administration, education, and economic development.
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  25. Hyam, Ronald. Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815–1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion. 3d ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
  26. DOI: 10.1057/9781403918420Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  27. An excellent introduction to the origins of Britain’s African empire, for students and general readers.
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  29. Hyam, Ronald. Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonization, 1918–1968. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
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  31. Written by one of the foremost specialists on the British Empire, this narrative survey is a compelling explanation for the empire’s short life and unexpectedly rapid demise in the 20th century.
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  33. Reference Works
  34.  
  35. Fage and Oliver 1975–1986 and UNESCO 1981–1993 are multi-volume collections of essays that cover the entire scope of African history. Both pay appropriate attention to British Africa. The African colonies also are well represented in Brown, et al. 1998–1999, and Oxford University Press addressed criticism that the series did not pay close enough attention to subject peoples by bringing out a companion volume to the series, Morgan and Hawkins 2004, that focused on the “black experience” of imperial rule. Kirk-Greene 1980 provides short biographies of the men who governed Britain’s African colonies. Those seeking more precise information on British rule in Africa will have to turn to more dated works. Hailey 1938 and Hailey 1950 are exhaustive surveys of virtually every aspect of colonial administration and society, and Kuczynki 1948–1949 provides a demographic snapshot of British Africa in the late 1940s.
  36.  
  37. Brown, Judith, William Roger Louis, Andrew Porter, and Robin Winks, eds. The Oxford History of the British Empire. 5 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–1999.
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  39. A thorough and comprehensive survey of the British Empire. The volumes that have the most African material are Vol. 3, the 19th century; Vol. 4, the 20th century; and Vol. 5, historiography.
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  41. Fage, J. D., and Roland Oliver, eds. The Cambridge History of Africa. 8 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1975–1986.
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  43. Conceived in the 1960s and completed in 1986, the eight-volume series covers the entire history of the continent from “the earliest times” to 1975. The volumes most relevant to British Africa are Vol. 5, 1790–1870; Vol. 6, 1870–1905; Vol. 7, 1905–1940; Vol. 8, 1940–1975.
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  45. Hailey, William Malcolm. An African Survey: A Study of Problems Arising in Africa South of the Sahara. London: Oxford University Press, 1938.
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  47. Written primarily by staff members and Colonial Office specialists from data provided by the various territorial governments, the African Survey is an encyclopedic treatment of virtually every aspect of western imperial rule in Africa in the 1930s. Key topics include: systems of government, “native administration,” taxation, labor policy, land tenure, agriculture, forests, soil erosion, health education, mining, and economic development. Revised substantially in 1956.
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  49. Hailey, William Malcom. Native Administration in the British African Territories. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1950.
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  51. A systematic semi-official five-volume survey of administrative practices in post-World War II British Africa by an ex-Indian provincial governor turned senior Colonial Office advisor. Part I, East Africa: Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika; Part II, Central Africa: Zanzibar, Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia; Part III, West Africa: Nigeria, Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, Gambia; Part IV, A General Survey of Native Administration.
  52. Find this resource:
  53. Kirk-Greene, A. H. M. A Biographical Dictionary of the British Colonial Governor. Vol. 1. Africa. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institute Press, 1980.
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  55. Provides biographical entries for almost two hundred African territorial governors.
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  57. Kuczynki, Robert. Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire. 2 vols. London: Oxford University Press, 1948–1949.
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  59. Statistical details of post-World War II British Africa broken down by territory. Topics include: “native” and “non-native” census data, immigration, fertility, general mortality, and population growth. Vol. 1, West Africa; Vol. 2, South Africa, High Commission Territories, East Africa, Mauritius, Seychelles.
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  61. Morgan, Philip, and Sean Hawkins, eds. Black Experience and the Empire. Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
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  63. Chapters relevant to British Africa include: West Africans and the Atlantic, The Black Experience in the British Empire, 1680–1810, Cultural Encounters: Britain and Africa in the Nineteenth Century, The British Empire and African Women in the Twentieth Century, African Participation in the British Empire, African Workers and Imperial Designs.
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  65. UNESCO. International Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa, ed. General History of Africa. 8 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981–1993.
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  67. UNESCO conceived of this eight-volume series as a work of African history written primarily by Africans. The University of California Press also published an abridged paperback version of the series. The volumes most relevant to British Africa are Vol. 6, Africa in the Nineteenth Century; Vol. 7, Africa under Colonial Domination 1880; Vol. 8 Africa since 1935.
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  69. Textbooks
  70.  
  71. Most textbook treatments of British Africa, like Oliver and Atmore 1994, Cooper 2002, and Shillington 2005, either include it as part of a general survey of African history or, like Porter 1975 and Hyam 2002, as part of a larger history of the British Empire.
  72.  
  73. Cooper, Frederick. Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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  75. A provocative and sometimes dense survey of African history in the later part of the 20th century. The book is highly informative, but it can be challenging for beginning students.
  76. Find this resource:
  77. Hyam, Ronald. Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815–1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion. 3d ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
  78. DOI: 10.1057/9781403918420Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  79. A well-regarded exploration of the primary reasons for Britain’s imperial expansion in the 19th century.
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  81. Oliver, Roland, and Anthony Atmore. Africa since 1800. 5th ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
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  83. Dating originally from 1967 and now in a much-revised fifth edition, this general survey of African history is still somewhat antiquated. Excellent maps.
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  85. Porter, Bernard. The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850–1970. New York: Longman, 1975.
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  87. A widely read, conventional top-down political history of the British Empire.
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  89. Shillington, Kevin. History of Africa. Revised 2d ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
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  91. A fine introductory history of Africa for general readers and beginning students. Eighteen of the thirty chapters are relevant to British Africa.
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  93. Journals
  94.  
  95. There is good coverage of British Africa in the main African history journals: African Affairs, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, the Journal of African History. Conversely, the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History and the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History are empire-focused journals that pay appropriate attention to Britain’s African territories. The Journal of African Administration, Oversea Education, and Tanganyika Notes and Records are defunct semi-official publications that covered various aspects of British imperial rule in Africa.
  96.  
  97. African Affairs. 1944–.
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  99. Published on behalf of the Royal African Society, this is one of the oldest journals focusing exclusively on Africa. Preceded by Journal of the African Society (1901–1935); Journal of the Royal African Society (1935–1944)
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  101. International Journal of African Historical Studies. 1971–.
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  103. A leading journal of current research in all periods, areas, and aspects of African history. Preceded by African Historical Studies (1968–1971).
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  105. Journal of African Administration. 1949–1961.
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  107. Produced by the Colonial Office’s African Studies Branch, this semi-official publication served as a forum for colonial administrators. Preceded by A Digest of African Local Administration (1947–1948) Succeeded by Journal of Local Administration Overseas (1962–1966)
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  109. Journal of African History. 1960–.
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  111. A pioneering journal reporting current research in African history.
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  113. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History. 2000–.
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  115. An internet publication covering all aspects of imperialism and colonialism from the tenth century to the present era. Payment or institutional access required.
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  117. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. 1972–.
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  119. Covers all of the British Empire and Commonwealth with an emphasis on matters relating to imperial policy and rivalries, colonial rule and local responses, the rise of nationalism, decolonization and the transfer of power, and the evolution of the Commonwealth.
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  121. Oversea Education: A Journal of Educational Experiment and Research in Tropical and Subtropical Areas. 1929–1963.
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  123. A semi-official journal of colonial education policy published for the Secretary of State for the Colonies by Oxford University Press.
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  125. Tanganyika Notes and Records. 1936–1965.
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  127. A representative sample of a publication of one of the many territorially based scholarly societies in British Africa. These were generally unofficial organizations made up of administrators, scientists, physicians, historians, anthropologists, and other assorted social scientists working on colonial topics. Other examples include the Uganda Journal, the Nyasaland Journal, the Northern Rhodesia Journal, and the Basutoland, Bechuanaland, and Sudan Notes and Records.
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  129. Historiography
  130.  
  131. Trends and conventions in scholarly treatments of British Africa largely reflect changing perceptions of empires. Johnston 1899 is typical of the semi-propagandistic histories that legitimized Britain’s participation in the conquest of Africa during the new imperial era. The assumption that African history was imperial history went largely unchallenged until the era of decolonization in the 1960s, when both African and western scholars began to write national histories of the former colonies, such as Iliffe 1979. As the optimism surrounding independence faded many Africanist scholars blamed British imperial rule for the failings of the new nation states according to Mamdani 1996. Atkins 1993 turned away from the study of empire entirely and focused on the lived experiences of ordinary people under imperial rule. Gann and Duignan 1967 defended western imperial rule as progressive by portraying pre-conquest Africa as backward and undeveloped. This historiographical rebuttal went largely unnoticed by Africanists until a new generation of conservative scholars like Ferguson 2003, which updated the characterization of the British Empire, found in Gann and Duignan 1967, as a force for global modernization. On the opposite end of the ideological spectrum scholars working in the “new imperial history” agreed that the British Empire was once again important. However, imperial histories like Lester 2001, informed by post-colonialism, cultural studies, linguistics, psychology, and queer theory aimed to blur the distinction between colony and metropole and to integrate British and African history.
  132.  
  133. Atkins, Keletso. The Moon is Dead! Give Us Our Money! The Cultural Origins of an African Work Ethic, Natal, South Africa, 1843–1900. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993.
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  135. One of the first books in the Heinemann Social History of Africa Series. Drawing on conventional archival records, oral histories, and Zulu-English phrase books, this is a study of the origins of a working class consciousness that focused on the everyday concerns of African workers.
  136. Find this resource:
  137. Ferguson, Niall. Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. London: Allen Lane, 2003.
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  139. An example of the early 21st-century revisionist trend in British imperial history that argues “no organization in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital, and labor than the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (p. xxi). Relatively little Africa content.
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  141. Gann, L. H. and Peter Duignan. Burden of Empire: An Appraisal of Western Colonialism in Africa South of the Sahara. New York: F. A. Praeger, 1967.
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  143. Rebuts the criticism of western imperialism in post-colonial Africanist historiography by portraying pre-conquest Africa as primitive and undeveloped and citing the construction of roads, railways, schools, hospitals, and wage employment as evidence of the “modernizing” benefits of European rule in Africa.
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  145. Iliffe, John. A Modern History of Tanganyika. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
  146. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511584114Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  147. A fine nationalist history of a former British colony that exemplifies the break with colonial-era historiography by placing Africans in the forefront of African history.
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  149. Johnston, Harry. The Colonization of Africa By Alien Races. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1899.
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  151. A representative sample of the extensive literature on the conquest of British Africa by one of its primary architects, this volume valorizes the conquerors and justifies the new imperialism by portraying Africans as backwards and unable to govern themselves.
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  153. Lester, Alan. Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain. London: Routledge, 2001.
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  155. Argues that the identities that emerged in the eastern cape region of South Africa in the 19th century were the result of practices and ideas drawn from throughout the British Empire.
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  157. Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
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  159. Argues that British rule in Africa instituted a form of “decentralized despotism” that led to authoritarian post-colonial African nations.
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  161. Archives and Document Collections
  162.  
  163. The University of London’s Institute of Commonwealth Studies 1992a and Institute of Commonwealth Studies 1992b are a series of extremely useful edited primary source document collections relating to various aspects of British rule in Africa in cooperation with the British government. A variety of Internet resources now augment these excellent primary sources. Parliamentary debates can be found on the Hansard website, and the website of the British National Archives (The National Archives [TNA]) makes a wide variety of important documents available for download. Films and images relating to the British Empire in Africa can be found on the TNA’s Africa Through a Lens site, the Royal Commonwealth Society Photograph Project, and a site called Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire.
  164.  
  165. Africa Through a Lens.
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  167. A collection of images from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office photographic collection (CO 1069) hosted by the British National Archives.
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  169. Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire.
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  171. The website offers detailed information on over 6,000 films showing images of life in the British colonies. Viewers can find 160 films online, and 350 films have accompanying critical notes written by the website’s research team.
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  173. Hansard.
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  175. The British Parliament’s website offering access to digitized and searchable editions of Commons and Lords Hansard, the Official Report of debates in Parliament. An extremely useful resource, as both houses of parliament often debated African imperial issues.
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  177. Royal Commonwealth Society Photograph Project.
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  179. Contains 70,000 images relating to the history of the Commonwealth.
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  181. The British National Archives.
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  183. The holdings of the British National Archives (formerly the Public Records Office) are searchable. Cabinet papers and other select records can be downloaded. Copies of other files can be ordered through the website for a fee.
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  185. University of London, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, ed. British Documents on the End of Empire: Series A. 4 vols. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1992a.
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  187. A four-volume series of official documents from the British National Archives (formerly the Public Records Office) covering the last three decades of the British Empire. Vol. 1, Imperial Policy and Colonial Practice, 1925–1945; Vol. 2, The Labour Government and the End of Empire 1945–1951; Vol. 3, The Conservative Government and the End of Empire, 1951–1957; Vol. 4, The Conservative Government and the End of Empire, 1957–1964.
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  189. University of London, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, ed. British Documents on the End of Empire: Series B. 10 vols. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1992b.
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  191. A ten-volume series of official documents from the British National Archives (formerly the Public Records Office) focusing on the end of British rule in ten different territories. The volumes that relate to British Africa are: Vol. 1, Ghana; Vol. 4, Egypt, Vol. 5, Sudan; Vol. 7, Nigeria, Vol. 9, Central Africa.
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  193. The Origins of Britain’s African Empire
  194.  
  195. Historians have termed the conquest of Africa and the South Pacific and the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire the “new imperialism” to distinguish the new burst of western expansionism in the late 19th century from the North American settler colonialism and chartered company rule in Asia of the 17th and 18th centuries. In contrast to the first British Empire’s extensive holdings in North America, the West Indies, and India, Britain’s initial imperial presence in Africa was largely informal and constrained.
  196.  
  197. Early Contacts
  198.  
  199. Davies 1957 and Law 2006 describe how, unlike its more successful contemporaries in South Asia and the Americas, the Royal African Company was often heavily in debt and had a limited political and military reach. Boahen 1964; Wright 1997; Caulker 2009 expand on how coastal West Africans dealt with British merchants, explorers, and missionaries on relatively equal terms. According to Fyfe 1962, the port of Freetown in Sierra Leone was Britain’s only substantive African colony at the turn of the 19th century.
  200.  
  201. Boahen, A. Adu. Britain, the Sahara, and the Western Sudan, 1788–1861. Oxford: Clarendon, 1964.
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  203. An early work by a pioneering Ghanian historian on British abolitionist and commercial efforts in the West African hinterlands. Drawn largely from official British sources and English-language memoirs.
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  205. Caulker, Tcho Mbaimba. The African-British Long Eighteenth Century. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2009.
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  207. This theoretical and textual analysis of documents and treaties traces Britain’s evolving relationship with the coastal peoples of present day Sierra Leone over the course of the 18th century.
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  209. Davies, K. G. The Royal African Company. London: Longmans, 1957.
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  211. Based primarily on company records in the British National Archives, Davies’s book remains the definitive narrative history of the main English chartered company that traded in West Africa.
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  213. Fyfe, Christopher. A History of Sierra Leone. London: Oxford University Press, 1962.
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  215. The touchstone history of one of Britain’s first formal colonial possessions in Africa.
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  217. Law, Robin, ed. The English in West Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
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  219. A three volume collection of the correspondence of the Royal African Company edited by one of the foremost specialists in pre-colonial West African history. Part I, 1681–1699 (1997); Part II, 1685–1688 (2001); Part III, 1691–1699 (2006).
  220. Find this resource:
  221. Wright, Donald. The World and a Very Small Place in Africa. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997.
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  223. The very small place in Wright’s study is the Gambian territory of Niumi. The book traces the history of Niumi from the era of the Atlantic slave trade through the colonial period and on to its place in the Gambian nation state. Written primarily for students, it provides an excellent ground level perspective of how an African polity shifted from being British trading partners to British subjects.
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  225. The Era of Informal Empire in the 19th Century
  226.  
  227. As the British government remained largely uninterested in building an African empire for the first three-quarters of the 19th century (Great Britain House of Commons 1968), private explorers (Kennedy 2013), merchants (Cruickshank 1966, Lynn 1997), missionaries (Porter 1985), and abolitionists (Nwokeji and Eltis 2002) were the primary agents of British influence in Africa. Cruickshank 1966 shows how these men on the spot had considerable autonomy at a time when Britain preferred to rely on informal means to further its African economic and strategic interests.
  228.  
  229. Cruickshank, Brodie. Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast of Africa: Including an Account of the Native Tribes, and their Intercourse with Europeans. 2 vols. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966.
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  231. Brodie Cruickshank was a trader, diplomat, and jurist on the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) in the mid-19th century. First published in 1853.
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  233. Great Britain House of Commons, Select Committee on the West Coast of Africa. Report from the Select Committee on Africa (Western Coast): Together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix. Dublin, UK: Irish University Press, 1968.
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  235. Hearing evidence on the slave trade, the relations of British coastal settlements with Africans, the state of forts and missions, the Select Committee on the West Coast of Africa famously called for the eventual withdrawal from all of West Africa except Sierra Leone. First published in 1865.
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  237. Kennedy, Dane. The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
  238. DOI: 10.4159/harvard.9780674074972Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  239. Challenges conventional narratives of the British exploration of Africa (and Australia) by demonstrating that successful expeditions of discovery depended on the cooperation of local people who often diverted these enterprises to suit their own purposes.
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  241. Lynn, Martin. Commerce and Economic Change in West Africa: The Palm Oil Trade in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
  242. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511582035Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  243. A microeconomic history of the role that palm oil played in the changing relationship between British merchants and West African producers and brokers.
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  245. Nwokeji, G. Ugo, and David Eltis. “Characteristics of the Captives Leaving the Cameroons for the Americas, 1822–37.” Journal of African History 43 (2002): 191–210.
  246. DOI: 10.1017/S0021853701008076Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  247. Uses the Sierra Leone Liberated African registers to estimate the geographic origins of the people rescued by the Royal Navy’s West African Squadron. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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  249. Porter, Andrew. “‘Commerce and Christianity’: The Rise and Fall of the 19th Century Missionary Slogan.” Historical Journal 28 (1985): 597–621.
  250. DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X00003320Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  251. A useful study of the link between commerce and evangelical Protestantism in the expansion of British imperial influence. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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  253. British Southern Africa in the 19th Century
  254.  
  255. In contrast to the rest of the continent, formal British imperial rule in southern Africa began with the annexation of the Cape Colony in 1814. Thompson 2001 is a good narrative account of the entire 19th century, while Galbraith 1963 covers the factors that led to the expansion of British influence in the region. Guy 1980, Elbourne 2002, and Price 2008 provide varying perspectives of how specific African communities experienced these changes. The scholarship of Keegan 1996 and Storey 2008 on this period focuses the historical origins of the institutionalized racism that became a central feature of 20th century South Africa.
  256.  
  257. Elbourne, Elizabeth. Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002.
  258. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  259. Demonstrates the complexities of African encounters with Christianity by showing how the Khoekhoe (Khoikhoi) peoples of the Cape Colony used the teachings of the London Missionary Society to assert their autonomy.
  260. Find this resource:
  261. Galbraith, John. Reluctant Empire: British Policy on the South African Frontier, 1834–1854. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963.
  262. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  263. A classic study of British expansion in southern Africa in the first half of the 19th century.
  264. Find this resource:
  265. Guy, Jeff. The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom: The Civil War in Zululand 1879–1884. London: Longman, 1980.
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  267. Argues that internal divisions caused by the expansion of British rule in Natal, and not defeat in the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War, were the key factors that led to the subjugation of the Zulu people.
  268. Find this resource:
  269. Keegan, Timothy. Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996.
  270. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  271. Makes the case that British rule in first half of the 19th century contributed to the emergence of institutionalized racism in the Union of South Africa a century later.
  272. Find this resource:
  273. Price, Richard. Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Africa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
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  275. Reconsiders the origins of British rule in South Africa by focusing on interactions between the Xhosa peoples and British missionaries, politicians, and bureaucrats.
  276. Find this resource:
  277. Storey, William Kelleher. Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
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  279. A history of how the development and trade in firearms in the 17th through 19th centuries contributed to the emergence of institutionalized racial discrimination in southern Africa.
  280. Find this resource:
  281. Thompson, Leonard. A History of South Africa. 3d ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.
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  283. This highly accessible narrative history of South Africa by one of the foremost specialists in the field is a useful starting place for undergraduates and non-specialist readers.
  284. Find this resource:
  285. The New Imperialism and the “Scramble for Africa”
  286.  
  287. The question of why Britain took part in the “scramble for Africa” during the late 19th century is one of the oldest debates in African history. Robinson and Gallagher 1961 and Wright 1976 focus on a perceived need to protect British economic and strategic interests from western competitors. Headrick 1981 demonstrates that technological advances born of the industrial revolution now made such conquests inexpensive and relatively easy. More recent Africa-focused scholarship, found in Crowder 1972, Lonsdale 1985, Uzoigwe 1985, and Hopkins 1986, has productively exposed the limits of Eurocentric explanations for the new imperialism by providing a more nuanced local perspective on the wars of conquest that built Britain’s African empire.
  288.  
  289. Crowder, Michael, ed. West African Resistance: The Military Response to Colonial Occupation. New York: Africana Publishing, 1972.
  290. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  291. Essays on African opposition to the new imperialism in Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. The collection’s value in providing a local perspective on the European wars of conquest is offset by a tendency by many of the authors to simplistically equate resistance with post-colonial nationalism.
  292. Find this resource:
  293. Headrick, Daniel. The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
  294. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  295. A classic study of how western technological advances in transportation, communications, medicine, and armaments made the new imperialism possible.
  296. Find this resource:
  297. Hopkins, A. G. “The Victorians and Africa: A Reconsideration of the Occupation of Egypt, 1882.” Journal of African History 27 (1986): 363–391.
  298. DOI: 10.1017/S0021853700036719Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  299. Convincingly rebuts Robinson and Gallagher’s assertion that Britain intervened in Egypt and East Africa in the 1880s to protect its strategic routes to India by demonstrating that the Egyptian nationalists were not a threat to British control of the Suez Canal. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  300. Find this resource:
  301. Lonsdale, John. “The European Scramble and Conquest in African History.” In The Cambridge History of Africa. Vol. 6, From 1870–1905. Edited by Roland Oliver, G. N. Sanderson, and J. D. Fage. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
  302. DOI: 10.1017/CHOL9780521228039Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  303. A brief but still comprehensive critical reconsideration of the conquest era from an African history perspective. Usefully updates and critiques the various explanations for the new imperialism offered by Wright and Robinson and Gallagher.
  304. Find this resource:
  305. Robinson, Ronald, and John Gallagher. Africa and the Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism in the Dark Continent. New York: St. Martin’s, 1961.
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  307. Attributes the British decision to participate in the European conquest of Africa to a series of peripheral crises that forced successive British governments to claim African territory to protect their strategic interests in Egypt and southern Africa. Based primarily on official documents.
  308. Find this resource:
  309. Uzoigwe, G. N. “European Partition and Conquest of Africa: An Overview.” In General History of Africa VII: Africa under Colonial Domination, 1880–1935. Edited by A. Adu Boahen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
  310. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  311. Usefully read in conjunction with the Wright collection, Uzoigwe’s essay offers an African counterpoint to the heavily Eurocentric conventional explanations for the new imperialism. See also his 1974 Britain and the Conquest of Africa.
  312. Find this resource:
  313. Wright, Harrison M., ed. The “New Imperialism”: Analysis of Late Nineteenth-Century Expansion. 2d ed. Lexington, MA: Heath, 1976.
  314. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  315. Covers the most common explanations for the new imperialism by excerpting the works of Arendt, Hobson, Langer, Lenin, Schumpeter, and other influential imperial theorists.
  316. Find this resource:
  317. Governance
  318.  
  319. Empire, by its very definition, means rule, and as was the case with most all empires, the British did not rule in Africa with the consent of their subjects. Varying from region to region and territory to territory, the legitimizing ideologies for British imperial rule ranged from benevolent authoritarianism to racist social Darwinism. There was no uniform administrative system for all of British Africa. In contrast to the French philosophies of assimilation and association, British officials declared that their goal was to help their African subjects develop along their own culturally distinct lines.
  320.  
  321. Administration
  322.  
  323. Scholars and students would do well to pay close attention to the administrative structure of British Africa. Jeffries 1956, Heussler 1963, and Kirk-Greene 1999 are the most authoritative histories of the colonial service. Gann and Duignan 1978 and Faught 2012 provide biographies of some of the most significant colonial administrators, while Prior 2013 is an updated study of the training and mindset of lower level district officers in Africa.
  324.  
  325. Faught, C. Brad. Into Africa: The Imperial Life of Margery Perham. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012.
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  327. While the vast majority of administrators who ran Britain’s African empire were men, there were a few notable exceptions. The academic Margery Perham served as a high-level government policy adviser on African matters for more than forty years. This biography is based primarily on her private papers.
  328. Find this resource:
  329. Gann, L. H., and Peter Duignan, eds. African Proconsuls: European Governors in Africa. New York: Free Press, 1978.
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  331. Provides brief but detailed biographic sketches of Frederick Lugard (Nigeria), Robert Coryndon (Uganda, Kenya) and William Cohen (Uganda).
  332. Find this resource:
  333. Heussler, Robert. Yesterday’s Rulers: The Making of the British Colonial Service. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1963.
  334. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  335. A detailed analysis of the selection and training of the colonial service that pays more attention to India than Africa.
  336. Find this resource:
  337. Jeffries, Charles. The Colonial Office. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956.
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  339. Jeffries was a senior Colonial Office official. This 1956 work, a revision of his The Colonial Empire and Its Civil Service (1938), provides detailed information on the organization and mission of Britain’s colonial service.
  340. Find this resource:
  341. Kirk-Greene, Anthony. On Crown Service: A History of HM and Overseas Civil Services. London: I. B. Tauris, 1999.
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  343. Updates Jeffries and Heussler by explaining how the colonial service evolved into Her Majesty’s Oversea (later Overseas) Colonial Service in the 1950s, in response to the changing nature of the empire. The second half of the book contains a comprehensive bibliography of primary and published sources relating to all aspects of the colonial service.
  344. Find this resource:
  345. Prior, Christopher. Exporting Empire: Africa, Colonial Officials, and the Construction of the British Imperial State, 1900–1939. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013.
  346. DOI: 10.7228/manchester/9780719083686.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  347. A new study of how British administrators interacted with each other and the Africans they governed.
  348. Find this resource:
  349. Indirect Rule
  350.  
  351. Originating primarily in British India, the doctrine of indirect rule enabled British officials to pose as the benevolent guardians of “native” customs and traditions by ruling through and in cooperation with local institutions of authority. Lugard 1965 and Cameron 1982 presented an idealized view of these policies in the inter-war era, but Lambert 1995 shows that administrators used similar methods to govern Natal in the mid-nineteenth century. Afigbo 1972 convincingly rebuts Lugard and Cameron by showing that the Nigerian chiefs were largely colonial appointees with little actual legitimacy, while the authors in Lawrence, et al. 2006 shows that African civil servants were often the primary agents of imperial authority. Indirect rule’s dependence on “native” tradition and institutions to govern also created opportunities for these intermediaries to enrich themselves and contest imperial authority by claiming expertise in tribal law and custom. (Mann and Roberts 1991) Contrary to Lugard, Mamdani 1996 argues that these British administrative policies left Anglophone African with a legacy of authoritarian rule. For more on indirect rule and customary law, see related Oxford Bibliographies article on the Invention of Tradition.
  352.  
  353. Afigbo, A. E. The Warrant Chiefs: Indirect Rule in Southeastern Nigeria, 1891–1929. London: Longman, 1972.
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  355. A groundbreaking study by a pioneering Nigerian historian that illuminates the fictions of indirect rule by showing that the warrant chiefs the British appointed to govern southeastern Nigeria lacked legitimacy because Lugard’s system had no local precedents.
  356. Find this resource:
  357. Cameron, Donald. My Tanganyika Service, and Some Nigeria. 2d ed. Washington, DC: University of America Press, 1982.
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  359. As a subordinate and disciple of Frederick Lugard, Cameron brought the Nigerian version of indirect rule to East Africa as the governor of Tanganyika. This 1982 edition of the original 1939 publication includes a useful annotated introductory essay by Robert Heussler, an expert on the colonial service.
  360. Find this resource:
  361. Lambert, John. “Chiefship in Early Colonial Natal, 1843–1879.” Journal of Southern African Studies 21 (1995): 269–285.
  362. DOI: 10.1080/03057079508708446Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  363. A study of how pioneer administrators like Theophilus Shepstone co-opted and adapted local administrative systems to govern Zulu communities in19th century Natal. The article also demonstrates that indirect rule in Africa pre-dated the new imperial era. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  364. Find this resource:
  365. Lawrence, Benjamin, Emily Osborn, and Richard Roberts, eds. Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.
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  367. Includes useful essays on the role of various kinds of African civil servants in governing the Cape Colony and Natal, Kenya, Nigeria, and Tanganyika.
  368. Find this resource:
  369. Lugard, Frederick. The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. 5th ed. London: Frank Cass, 1965.
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  371. First published in 1922, Lugard’s answer to the post-World War I critics of the British Empire is the definitive, but highly idealized, statement of the British policy of indirect rule in Africa. Britain’s “dual mandate” was an obligation to both civilize and uplift “primitive” Africans and develop the resources of the continent for the greater good of Britain and the entire world. Lugard argued that these goals were neither incompatible nor contradictory.
  372. Find this resource:
  373. Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
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  375. An influential study of how British colonial rule produced distinct categories of privileged urban Europeans and marginalized ethnically segregated rural African subjects. Mamdami labels the unrepresentative institutions of indirect rule “decentralized despotism” and argues that their primary legacy was authoritarian post-colonial African nations.
  376. Find this resource:
  377. Mann, Kristin, and Richard Roberts, eds. Law in Colonial Africa. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991.
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  379. The essays in this collection draw primarily on court records to show how Africans used the colonial legal system and its various conceptions of customary (“tribal”) law to compete for prestige, political power, and resources. The chapters on British Africa touch on Nigeria, Tanganyika (Tanzania), Bechuanaland (Botswana), and Uganda.
  380. Find this resource:
  381. Mechanisms of Control
  382.  
  383. According to Anderson and Killingray 1991 and Parsons 1999, it was a testament to the general effectiveness of indirect rule that African soldiers and policemen provided most of the security for British Africa. Killingray 1979 describes how the authorities in London occasionally fantasized about raising a substantial “black army” for wider service to the empire, while Foran 1962, Clayton and Killingray 1989, and Stapleton 2011 show that the British colonial police and military forces were small, improvised, and significantly under-funded. This also largely held true during the world wars, as described in Page 1987 and Killingray 2010, when financial and political considerations led imperial strategists and colonial governments to raise a wide variety of poorly paid and trained African labor and support formations and relatively few frontline African combat units.
  384.  
  385. Anderson, David, and David Killingray, eds. Policing the Empire: Government, Authority, and Control, 1830–1940. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1991.
  386. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  387. This systematic treatment of the form and function of imperial policing includes chapters on the police forces in Mombasa, Cape Town, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, the Gold Coast, and the Sudan.
  388. Find this resource:
  389. Clayton, Anthony, and David Killingray. Khaki and Blue: Military and Police in British Colonial Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1989.
  390. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  391. Provides a detailed look into the day-to-day operations of the Royal West African Frontier Force, the King’s African Rifles, and several colonial police forces. Drawn from the mostly European testimonies, memoirs, and personal reminiscences of police and military service in the Oxford Colonial Record Project.
  392. Find this resource:
  393. Foran, Robert. The Kenya Police, 1887–1960. London: Robert Hale Limited, 1962.
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  395. A semi-official history of the Kenya Police by one of its founding officers.
  396. Find this resource:
  397. Killingray, David. “The Idea of a British Imperial African Army.” Journal of African History 20 (1979): 421–436.
  398. DOI: 10.1017/S0021853700017394Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  399. Explores the aborted plans to transform the various African territorial militaries into a unified force that could augment or replace the Indian Army. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  400. Find this resource:
  401. Killingray, David. Fighting for Britain: African Soldiers in the Second World War. London: James Currey, 2010.
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  403. Based on original research and an exhaustive survey and synthesis of the published literature, this highly accessible narrative history by a pioneering scholar provides a detailed look at how African soldiers experienced service in British colonial military units during World War II.
  404. Find this resource:
  405. Page, Melvin, ed. Africa and the First World War. New York: St. Martin’s, 1987.
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  407. One of the original studies of the social consequences of African military service in wartime, the collection includes essays on the Gold Coast, Nigeria, the East African Protectorate (Kenya), Nyasaland (Malawi), Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and South Africa.
  408. Find this resource:
  409. Parsons, Timothy. The African Rank-and-File: Social Implications of Colonial Service in the King’s African Rifles, 1902–1964. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999.
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  411. A social history of East African military service that explains why politically disenfranchised Africans served colonial regimes that treated them as racially and socially inferior. Based on archival sources and oral histories of soldiers and their wives and children.
  412. Find this resource:
  413. Stapleton, Timothy. African Police and Soldiers in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1923–80. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011.
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  415. Usefully traces the changing nature of African police and military service in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) from the era of British South Africa Company rule in the 1890s through both world wars to the liberation struggle in the 1960s and 1970s.
  416. Find this resource:
  417. Christianity and Missions
  418.  
  419. Goodall 1954; Blood and Anderson-Morshead 1955–1962; Hewitt 1971 illustrate the central role played by the Protestant missions in justifying and founding Britain’s African empire and providing most of its meager social services. Doig 1946 is an example of how missionaries often played official roles in the colonial state. However, the more recent scholarship of McCracken 1977 and Comaroff and Comaroff 1991–1997 on African missions shows that Christian evangelism did not always produce its intended consequences, and Newman 1983 considers how the independent African churches that sprang up throughout British Africa challenged both mission orthodoxy and secular imperial rule. However, Peterson 2012 productively demonstrates that Christian conversion produced equally significant divisions within subject African communities. See also the related Oxford Bibliographies article on African Christianity.
  420.  
  421. Blood, A. G., and A. E. M. Anderson-Morshead. The History of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa. 3 vols. London: Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, 1955–1962.
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  423. An institutional history of one of the most influential British mission societies in Zanzibar and Central Africa. “High Anglicans” at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, and Dublin founded the mission in response to David Livingstone’s call to rescue Africans from the slave trade by spreading Christianity. Vol. 1, 1859–1902; Vol. 2, 1907–1932; Vol. 3, 1933–1957.
  424. Find this resource:
  425. Comaroff, John, and Jean Comaroff. Of Revelation and Revolution. 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991–1997.
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  427. Written by a pair of anthropologists, this highly influential two-volume study explores how cross-cultural interactions between the Tswana people of southern Africa and non-conformist Protestant missionaries produced new social practices, patterns of production and consumption, standards of style and beauty, class distinctions and ethnicities. Vol. 1, Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa; Vol. 2, Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier.
  428. Find this resource:
  429. Doig, Andrew. “The Christian Church and Demobilization in Africa.” International Review of Missions 35 (1946): 174–182.
  430. DOI: 10.1111/j.1758-6631.1946.tb04893.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  431. A firsthand account of the role that the Christian missions played in demobilizing and disciplining African veterans of the Second World War. Doig was a member of the Livingstonia Mission who served with the East African Army Chaplains Department. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  432. Find this resource:
  433. Goodall, Norman. A History of the London Missionary Society, 1895–1945. London: Oxford University Press, 1954.
  434. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  435. A largely Congregationalist mission, the London Missionary Society operated primarily in southern Africa.
  436. Find this resource:
  437. Hewitt, Gordon. The Problems of Success: A History of the Church Missionary Society, 1910–1942. Vol. 1, In Tropical Africa, the Middle East, at Home. London: SCM Press, 1971.
  438. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  439. Founded by the Clapham Sect at the turn of the 19th century, this evangelical Anglican mission worked in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanganyika (Tanzania), Uganda, the Sudan, the Congo, and Rwanda.
  440. Find this resource:
  441. McCracken, John. Politics and Christianity in Malawi, 1875–1940: The Impact of the Livingstonia Mission in the Northern Province. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
  442. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  443. Moving beyond a simple institutional history of an influential Scottish mission, this book offers a sophisticated analysis of its wider economic and cultural impact on northern Nyasaland (Malawi.)
  444. Find this resource:
  445. Newman, Richard. “Archbishop Daniel William Alexander and the African Orthodox Church.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 16 (1983): 615–630.
  446. DOI: 10.2307/218269Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  447. An authoritative study of one of the founders of one of the most influential African independent churches. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  448. Find this resource:
  449. Peterson, Derek. Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent, c. 1935–1972. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
  450. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139108614Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  451. A groundbreaking study that uses the East African Revival, a highly influential evangelical movement that spread rapidly throughout eastern and central Africa in the mid-20th century, to show how mission converts vied with African ethnic brokers (“patriots”) to define the nature of community, culture, and respectability. Peterson convincingly demonstrates that religious conversion was as much a political action as it was an internal declaration of belief.
  452. Find this resource:
  453. Education
  454.  
  455. In most cases, territorial governments provided grants-in-aid for mission schools that accepted official oversight in exchange for financial support. Sivonen 1995 addresses the shared goal of the religious and secular experts on African education, to avoid the perceived mistakes of the British education system in India by producing educated natives who would accept their place in colonial and tribal society. To this end, as described in Advisory Committee 1925 and Whitehead 1991, they brought the American model of industrial “negro education” to British Africa. Jones 1921 presents the recommendations of the Phelps Stokes Fund, most of the British colonies in eastern and central Africa established American-style Jeanes Schools that aimed to educate entire rural communities, as described in Benson 1936. Natsoulas 1998 shows that Africans frequently founded their own independent schools because they rejected the colonial adapted curriculum as inferior. Parsons 2004 tells how state and mission educators, concerned that Western education would inspire political opposition as it had in India, consequently sponsored African Boy Scout troops to buttress indirect rule by “retribalizing” African students. See also the related Oxford Bibliographies article on Education and the Study of Africa.
  456.  
  457. Advisory Committee on Native Education in the British Tropical African Dependencies. Education Policy in British Tropical Africa. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1925.
  458. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  459. This Colonial Office advisory committee made an adapted curriculum embodying rural “tribal” values the basis of education in British Africa.
  460. Find this resource:
  461. Benson, T. G. “The Jeanes School and the Education of the East Africa Native.” Journal of the Royal African Society 36 (1936): 418–431.
  462. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  463. Based on the recommendations of the Phelps Stokes reports, mission societies established schools based on the southern American model of community education. T. G. Benson was the first principal of the Kenyan Jeanes School. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  464. Find this resource:
  465. Jones, Thomas Jesse. Education in Africa: A Study of West, South, and Equatorial Africa. New York: Phelps-Stokes Fund, 1921.
  466. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  467. Thomas Jesse Jones was a Welsh-born expert on “negro education” in America who led two investigative tours of Africa financed by the Phelps Stokes Fund and the Carnegie Foundation. His highly influential reports advocated basing native school curricula on the African American model of industrial education that was a cornerstone of segregation in the southern United States. See also the 1924 report that covered eastern, central, and southern Africa.
  468. Find this resource:
  469. Natsoulas, Theodore. “The Kenyan Government and the Kikuyu Independent Schools: From Attempted Control to Suppression, 1929–1952.” The Historian 60 (1998): 289–305.
  470. DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6563.1998.tb01395.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  471. A study of one of the most well-known independent school movements in British Africa. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  472. Find this resource:
  473. Parsons, Timothy. Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004.
  474. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  475. Founded by a British colonial general who claimed that his movement was inspired in part by Zulu culture, the Boy Scout movement earned an informal place in the colonial curriculum by promising to “retribalize” potentially rebellious school boys.
  476. Find this resource:
  477. Sivonen, Seppo. White-Collar or Hoe Handle? African Education under British Colonial Policy, 1920–1945. Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1995.
  478. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  479. A survey of colonial education policy in the mid-20th century that is critical of the adapted curriculum.
  480. Find this resource:
  481. Whitehead, Clive. “The Advisory Committee on Education in the [British] Colonies, 1924–1961.” Paedagogica Historica 27 (1991): 385–421.
  482. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  483. A revisionist interpretation of the Advisory Committee on Native Education that argues that the adapted curriculum was the only feasible option in most African colonies. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  484. Find this resource:
  485. Race
  486.  
  487. Hierarchal conceptions of racial difference underpinned British rule in Africa. Lugard 1921 depicted Africans as racially different and inferior to justify British trusteeship, and Kennedy 1987 explores how settlers in east, central, and southern Africa claimed political and social privileges on the grounds that they were racially superior to Africans The assumption that specific African communities had distinct racial characteristics was a cornerstone of indirect rule, and Kirk-Greene 1980 shows how colonial military officers made their recruiting decisions based on these stereotypes. Bush 1999 explores racial discrimination as a key factor in provoking African resistance to British rule, but Ray 2009 reveals how it was also virtually impossible for the colonial regimes to impose rigid racial segregation. Glassman 2011 further demonstrates that not all racism in Africa was the result of colonial policy. See also the related Oxford Bibliographies article on the Image of Africa.
  488.  
  489. Bush, Barbara. Imperialism, Race and Resistance: Africa and Britain, 1919–1945. London: Routledge, 1999.
  490. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  491. Argues that the inherently racist nature of British imperial rule was a key factor in provoking anti-colonial resistance in western and southern Africa.
  492. Find this resource:
  493. Glassman, Jonathon. War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.
  494. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  495. A highly regarded study of the indigenous and colonial origins of ethnic strife and racial violence in Zanzibar.
  496. Find this resource:
  497. Kennedy, Dane. Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1939. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987.
  498. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  499. The definitive history of settler colonialism in British Africa.
  500. Find this resource:
  501. Kirk-Greene, A. H. M. “Damnosa Hereditas: Ethnic Ranking and Martial Race Imperatives in Africa.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 3 (1980): 393–414.
  502. DOI: 10.1080/01419870.1980.9993313Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  503. Analyzes the dire consequences of the British colonial military recruiters’ assumption that certain African communities were “natural” warriors. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  504. Find this resource:
  505. Lugard, F. D. “The Colour Problem.” Edinburgh Review 233 (April 1921): 267–283.
  506. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  507. An influential semi-official statement of inter-war racial policy in British Africa.
  508. Find this resource:
  509. Ray, Carina. “‘The White Wife Problem’: Sex, Race and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa.” Gender & History 21 (2009): 628–646.
  510. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2009.01567.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  511. Provides a telling illustration of how intimacy between Britons and their African subjects complicated and undermined the racial and gendered order in British Africa. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  512. Find this resource:
  513. Gender and Sexuality
  514.  
  515. As seen in Dougall 1937, missionaries, educators, and government officials believed that the obligations of trusteeship included the promotion of orthodox western gender norms. Thomas 2003 shows that this resulted in struggles over fundamental issues like sexuality and maternity. Economic change also often undermined the colonial regime’s efforts to promote western-style domesticity, as described in Allman and Tashjian 2000. White 1990 and Epprecht 2004 demonstrate that British rule also created opportunities for alternative and sometimes subversive gender identities to emerge. McCulloch 2000 and Newell 2006 show how Britons themselves found the less restrictive sexual mores of colonial Africa both terrifying and liberating. See also the related Oxford Bibliographies article on Women and Colonialism.
  516.  
  517. Allman, Jean, and Victoria Tashjian. “I Will Not Eat Stone”: A Women’s History of Colonial Asante. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000.
  518. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  519. A comprehensive social history of Asante women, the authors show how cocoa production and the rise of a cash economy transformed marriage as an institution and relations between husbands and wives and parents and children.
  520. Find this resource:
  521. Dougall, James W. C., ed. Christianity and the Sex-Education of the African. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1937.
  522. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  523. Captures the mid-20th century mission view of African sexuality.
  524. Find this resource:
  525. Epprecht, Marc. Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004.
  526. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  527. Spanning the pre-conquest, colonial, and national eras, this is an ambitious study of the multiplicity of gender norms in southern Africa by a pioneering scholar.
  528. Find this resource:
  529. McCulloch, Jock. Black Peril, White Virtue, Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902–1935. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
  530. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  531. A study of how the sense of vulnerability among the privileged minority Rhodesian settler communities manifested itself as anxiety about the sexual threat African men posed to their women.
  532. Find this resource:
  533. Newell, Stephanie. The Forger’s Tale: The Search for Odeziaku. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006.
  534. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  535. An engaging and innovative study of the intersection of race, class, and sexuality in British Africa that tells the story of a convicted British forger who reinvented himself in southeastern Nigeria as a palm oil trader, author, and gay man.
  536. Find this resource:
  537. Thomas, Lynn. The Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
  538. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  539. Focusing on Kenya’s Meru community, a study of the competition among local people, missionaries, and the Kenyan state made female labor, sexuality, and reproduction the focus of political and social struggle.
  540. Find this resource:
  541. White, Luise. The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
  542. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226895000.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  543. An influential study of the changing nature and meaning of prostitution that shows how women survived and sometimes prospered within the restricted physical and social spaces in colonial Nairobi.
  544. Find this resource:
  545. West Africa
  546.  
  547. The West African colonies were distinctly different from the rest of British Africa. High population densities and a relatively unwelcoming climate meant that there were no significant settler populations. Coastal communities in what became Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Gambia, and Sierra Leone were in commercial and diplomatic contact with Britain, Europe, and the wider Atlantic world since the late 15th century. In the mid-19th century, small groups of westernized English-speaking Africans became important agents of British diplomatic and commercial influence during the era of informal empire. This meant that Nigeria and the Gold Coast were more economically viable than the east or central African colonies, but colonial officials like Frederick Lugard generally considered the class of more westernized and politically active West Africans to be more a nuisance than an asset because they did not fit neatly into the tribal categories that were the basis of indirect rule.
  548.  
  549. Nigeria
  550.  
  551. Lugard 1920 laid the groundwork for the modern Nigerian nation state by combining the heretofore-separate northern and southern Nigerian colonies into a single administrative unit. Carland 1985 provides a narrative history of these early decades, but Achebe 2011 exposes the illogic and inconsistency of the Lugardian system of indirect rule. Colonized Nigerians actively contested the colonial government’s tax, described in Matera, et al. 2012, and labor policies, described in Brown 2003; and Falola 2009 argues that its responses to this resistance were inherently authoritarian and violent.
  552.  
  553. Achebe, Nwando. The Female King of Colonial Nigeria. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.
  554. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  555. A biography of an Igbo woman, Ahebi Ugbabe, who became a Nigerian warrant chief despite the fact that the British authorities considered it a traditionally male role.
  556. Find this resource:
  557. Brown, Carolyn. “We Are All Slaves”: African Miners, Culture, and Resistance at the Enugu Government Colliery, Nigeria, 1914–1950. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003.
  558. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  559. An analysis of colonial labor policies as seen through the perspective of Nigerian miners.
  560. Find this resource:
  561. Carland, John. The Colonial Office and Nigeria, 1898–1914. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institute Press, 1985.
  562. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  563. A political and administrative history that covers company rule, the establishment of Nigeria as a Crown Colony, railway construction, and oil prospecting in the first two decades of British rule.
  564. Find this resource:
  565. Falola, Toyin. Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009.
  566. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  567. Argues that British imperial rule left a legacy of violence and authoritarian rule in post-colonial Nigeria.
  568. Find this resource:
  569. Lugard, F. D. Report on the Amalgamation of Northern and Southern Nigeria, and Administration, 1912–1919. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1920.
  570. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  571. Lugard’s report to Parliament on his decision to combine Northern and Southern Nigeria into a single colony.
  572. Find this resource:
  573. Matera, Marc, Misty Bastian, and Susan Kingsley Kent. The Women’s War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
  574. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  575. The “women’s war” was a tax revolt by thousands of southeastern Nigerian women that sparked a notoriously violent response from the colonial government that killed fifty protesters. A collaborative effort between an Africanist anthropologist and two historians of Britain, the book innovatively blends metropolitan British and Nigerian perspectives of this infamous incident.
  576. Find this resource:
  577. The Gold Coast (Ghana)
  578.  
  579. Cardinall 1931, Kuklick 1979, and Williamson and Kirk-Greene 2000 provide information on the form and function of the Gold Coast administration before the Second World War. The Asante community has tended to attract the greatest scholarly attention by virtue of considerable economic and political influence in the territory. Berry 2000 and Allman and Tashjian 2000 show how the commercialization of agriculture, and cocoa production in particular, had a profound influence on Asante gender relations, litigation, and land ownership. McCaskie 2000 covers much of the same ground by focusing on a single Asante village. Lawler 2001 provides a balance to the Asante-centric focus of Gold Coast scholarship by showing how its northern and coastal regions became strategically important during World War II and telling the story of the men from all over the territory who served in the colonial military.
  580.  
  581. Allman, Jean, and Victoria Tashjian. “I Will Not Eat Stone”: A Women’s History of Colonial Asante. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000.
  582. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  583. Provides a detailed look at life under British rule through extensive life histories of Asante women.
  584. Find this resource:
  585. Berry, Sara. Chiefs Know Their Boundaries: Essays on Property, Power, and the Past in Asante, 1896–1996. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000.
  586. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  587. A sophisticated analysis of how the wealth generated by commercial agriculture produced conflicts over land in Asante that were contested in a variety of formal legal and informal social arenas.
  588. Find this resource:
  589. Cardinall, A. W. The Gold Coast, 1931. Accra, Ghana: Government Printer, 1931.
  590. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  591. A semi-official survey of the Gold Coast’s political, economic, and social institutions by its Chief Census Officer. Concludes with a comprehensive bibliography.
  592. Find this resource:
  593. Kuklick, Henrika. The Imperial Bureaucrat: The Colonial Administrative Service in the Gold Coast, 1920–1939. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1979.
  594. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  595. While many critics found the author’s attempt at a quantitative statistical analysis of the Gold Coast civil service unsatisfying, the book provides useful insights into the men who ran the colony through their detailed personnel files.
  596. Find this resource:
  597. Lawler, Nancy. Soldiers, Airmen, Spies & Whispers: The Gold Coast in World War II. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001.
  598. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  599. Places the Gold Coast and its people in the wider context of the Second World War.
  600. Find this resource:
  601. McCaskie, T. C. Asante Identities: History and Modernity in an African Village, 1850–1950. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
  602. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  603. A study of how the people of a single Asante village experienced British rule during the transition from informal to formal empire.
  604. Find this resource:
  605. Williamson, Thora, and A. H. M. Kirk-Greene. Gold Coast Diaries: Chronicles of Political Officers in West Africa, 1900–1919. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000.
  606. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  607. Provides insights into what it was like to serve as a political officer in the Gold Coast during the first two decades of the 20th century through their diaries.
  608. Find this resource:
  609. East Africa
  610.  
  611. In contrast to West Africa, Britain had little contact with East Africa until the mid-19th century. The British imposed a protectorate on the Zanzibar sultanate as part of their efforts to eliminate the slave trade and to assert greater influence over the Indian Ocean region. During the conquest era of the 1880s, they claimed Kenya and Uganda, and their victory in the First World War brought Tanganyika (the former German East Africa). Unlike coastal West Africa, the East African highlands were suitable for European settlement, and the interests of the small but politically powerful Kenyan settler community had a strong influence on British colonial policy throughout the entire region.
  612.  
  613. Uganda
  614.  
  615. Lugard 1893 and MacDonald 1897 are firsthand accounts of the British intervention in the politics of the centralized kingdoms around Lake Victoria/Nyanza that led to the creation of the Uganda Protectorate. Steinhart 1977 and Low 2009 are narrative histories of these same events. Twaddle 1993 tells the same story from the perspective of one of Britain’s key local allies, and Johnson 1989 provides the origins of Lugard’s and MacDonald’s African soldiers. Omara-Otunnu 1987 is political and military history that links the British conquest of Uganda to the rise of Idi Amin as the tyrannical ruler of the post-colonial Ugandan nation state.
  616.  
  617. Johnson, Douglas. “The Structure of a Legacy: Military Slavery in Northeast Africa.” Ethnohistory 36 (1989): 72–88.
  618. DOI: 10.2307/482742Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  619. Shows how the troops that conquered much of East Africa for Britain were originally military slaves. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  620. Find this resource:
  621. Low, D. A. Fabrication of Empire: The British and the Uganda Kingdoms, 1890–1902. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
  622. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511576522Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  623. A narrative history of how the British knitted thirty kingdoms together to create the Uganda Protectorate.
  624. Find this resource:
  625. Lugard, Fredrick. The Rise of Our East African Empire. 2 vols. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1893.
  626. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  627. Lugard’s account of the role he played in bringing the southern kingdoms of Uganda under British protection as an agent of the Imperial British East Africa Company.
  628. Find this resource:
  629. MacDonald, James Ronald Leslie. Soldiering and Surveying in British East Africa. London: Edward Arnold, 1897.
  630. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  631. After carrying out the preliminary survey of the Uganda Railway, MacDonald became the Commissioner for Uganda in 1891. While serving as the commander of an expedition to survey the borders of northern Uganda in 1897, he played the central role in putting down a mutiny by his own Sudanese troops.
  632. Find this resource:
  633. Omara-Otunnu, Amii. Politics and the Military in Uganda, 1890–1985. London: Macmillan, 1987.
  634. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  635. A political and military history of Uganda that attributes the rise of Idi Amin to British colonial military policy.
  636. Find this resource:
  637. Steinhart, Edward. Conflict and Collaboration: Kingdoms of Western Uganda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.
  638. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  639. In explaining how the Kingdoms of Bunyoro, Toro, and Ankole came under British rule, Steinhart shows that their rulers who became imperial clients were not “collaborators” in the western nationalist sense. Rather their accommodation with a foreign conquering power was a pragmatic decision to preserve as much political power as possible by exploiting the limitations of indirect rule.
  640. Find this resource:
  641. Twaddle, M. Kakungulu and the Creation of Uganda, 1868–1928. London: James Currey, 1993.
  642. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  643. In this political biography of Semei Kakungulu, one of Britain’s powerful military allies, Twaddle shows how ambitious Africans used the British imperial intervention in Uganda to pursue their own interests.
  644. Find this resource:
  645. Kenya
  646.  
  647. The origins of Kenya as a “white man’s country” can be found in Eliot 1905. Fadiman 1993 and Spear and Waller 1993 explore how specific African communities experienced British conquest and rule. Berman 1990 is a comprehensive study of the Kenyan colonial state, and Clayton and Savage 1974 and Spencer 1984 show that this government consistently favored the interests of the settlers over the African population. Hirst 1994 is an unconventional but scholarly study of how Nairobi evolved as a segregated, but inherently African, city. Lonsdale and Berman 1992 is a broader and more theoretical analysis of how Africans experienced the inherent contradictions of British rule in Kenya.
  648.  
  649. Berman, Bruce. Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: The Dialectic of Domination. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1990.
  650. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  651. Written by a political scientist turned historian, the book provides both a comprehensive study of the Kenyan colonial state and an incisive analysis of its inherent weaknesses.
  652. Find this resource:
  653. Clayton, Anthony and Donald Savage. Government and Labour in Kenya, 1895–1963. London: Frank Cass, 1974.
  654. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  655. Focused primarily on the pre-World War II era, a comprehensive study of how the settlers influenced the colonial government’s African labor policies.
  656. Find this resource:
  657. Eliot, Charles. The East African Protectorate. London: Edward Arnold, 1905.
  658. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  659. Eliot was the commissioner (governor) who made the decision to encourage European settlement in the East African protectorate (Kenya).
  660. Find this resource:
  661. Fadiman, Jeffrey. When We Began, There Were Witchmen: An Oral History from Mount Kenya. Los Angeles: University of California, 1993.
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  663. Fadiman’s study of how British rule transformed Meru social and political institutions stands out among the many fine histories of Kenyan communities in the colonial era through its innovative use of oral history. Fadiman learned firsthand how to become a proper man from Meru elders by recruiting a group of younger Meru males to join him in seeking initiation into full adulthood.
  664. Find this resource:
  665. Hirst, Terry. The Struggle for Nairobi. Nairobi, Kenya: Mazingira Institute, 1994.
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  667. An insightful and scholarly narrative history of inequality in Nairobi in the format of a graphic novel. [ISBN: 9789966987617]
  668. Find this resource:
  669. Lonsdale, John, and Bruce Berman. Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa. 2 vols. London: James Currey, 1992.
  670. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  671. One of the most influential works of Kenyan history, this challenging two-volume collection of essays by a political scientist and a historian analyze the role of capitalism and imperial rule in creating the medium through which Britain’s African subjects debated their collective identities.
  672. Find this resource:
  673. Spear, Thomas, and Richard Waller, eds. Being Maasai: Ethnicity and Identity in East Africa. London: James Currey, 1993.
  674. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  675. In surveying the multiple conceptions of what it means to “be Maasai,” the authors provide a sophisticated analysis of identity formation in the Rift Valley in pre-conquest and colonial eras.
  676. Find this resource:
  677. Spencer, Ian. “Settler Dominance, Agricultural Production and the Second World War in Kenya.” Journal of African History 21 (1984): 497–514.
  678. DOI: 10.1017/S0021853700018715Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  679. A powerful indictment of the settler community’s use of wartime economic policies to enrich themselves at the expense of African farmers and pastoralists. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  680. Find this resource:
  681. Mau Mau
  682.  
  683. While the Mau Mau Emergency has attracted more scholarly attention than any other topic in Kenyan history, the full story of the revolt is still not entirely known. Lonsdale 1990 provides a succinct and definitive survey of the various interpretations of Mau Mau, and Corfield 1960 is the colonial government’s official explanation of the rebellion. Itote 1967 is typical of the many memoirs and autobiographies that Kikuyu participants in the revolt published in the 1960s and 1970s. Kanogo 1987 and Kershaw 1997 are representative examples of the extensive scholarship that has probed the various aspects of Mau Mau. Anderson 2005 and Elkins 2005 provide new perspectives on the Emergency based on new evidence and reinterpretations of the standard oral and archival sources.
  684.  
  685. Anderson, David. Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire. New York: Norton, 2005.
  686. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  687. Based primarily on heretofore-suppressed colonial court records, this is the most thorough and up-to-date narrative history of the revolt.
  688. Find this resource:
  689. Corfield, F. D. Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of Mau Mau. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1960.
  690. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  691. The Kenyan government’s official explanation for the origins of Mau Mau. Corfield, a retired senior official in the Sudan Political Service, concluded that it was ultimately sparked by the Kikuyu community’s psychological inability to cope with modernity rather than anger over misrule by the imperial regime.
  692. Find this resource:
  693. Elkins, Caroline. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. New York: Henry Holt, 2005.
  694. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  695. Focuses on the human rights abuses committed by the Kenyan security forces during the suppression of the revolt and their incarceration of tens of thousands of suspected Mau Mau oath-takers. The book won a Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, but critics questioned its unproblematic use of oral history and its controversial charge that the colonial government sought to exterminate the entire Kikuyu community.
  696. Find this resource:
  697. Itote, Waruhiu. “Mau Mau” General. Nairobi, Kenya: East African Publishing House, 1967.
  698. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  699. The personal memoir of a prominent Mau Mau military commander.
  700. Find this resource:
  701. Kanogo, Tabitha. Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1987.
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  703. The definitive study of the poor and landless people who were the primary instigators of the revolt.
  704. Find this resource:
  705. Kershaw, Greet. Mau Mau from Below. London: James Currey, 1997.
  706. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  707. Based in part on the author’s fieldwork during the later years of the revolt, the book is a micro-history of how four Kikuyu villages experienced Mau Mau.
  708. Find this resource:
  709. Lonsdale, John. “Mau Maus of the Mind: Making Mau Mau and Remaking Kenya.” Journal of African History 31 (1990): 393–421.
  710. DOI: 10.1017/S0021853700031157Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  711. A concise and definitive survey of the various interpretations of Mau Mau. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  712. Find this resource:
  713. Tanzania
  714.  
  715. Cameron 1982 and Sayers 1930 provide the details of how the British governed this former German colony after the First World War, and Iliffe 1979 is still the definitive narrative history of colonial Tanganyika (Tanzania). Insights into how urban Africans experienced British rule can be found in Burton 2005, while Beidelman 2012 addresses a similar question from the perspective of a small rural community.
  716.  
  717. Beidelman, T. O. The Culture of Colonialism: The Cultural Subjection of Ukaguru. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012.
  718. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  719. Explores the experience of colonial subject-hood from the perspective of a small community in central Tanzania.
  720. Find this resource:
  721. Burton, Andrew. African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime & Colonial Disorder in Dar es Salaam. London: James Currey, 2005.
  722. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  723. A study of how British rule and rapid urbanization produced social disorder in Dar es Salaam that contributed to the emergence of new cultural values and a distinct underclass.
  724. Find this resource:
  725. Cameron, Donald. My Tanganyika Service, and Some Nigeria. 2d ed. Washington, DC: University of America Press, 1982.
  726. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  727. Cameron was the second British governor of Tanganyika who brought the Nigerian version of indirect rule to East Africa. This 1982 edition is a reprint of the original 1939 publication.
  728. Find this resource:
  729. Iliffe, John. A Modern History of Tanganyika. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
  730. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511584114Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  731. Probably the best narrative history of any single British African colony. Highly influential in its analysis of the role of colonial rule in “tribal” identity formation.
  732. Find this resource:
  733. Sayers, G. F., ed. The Handbook of Tanganyika. London: Macmillan, 1930.
  734. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  735. A semi-official publication that provides a detailed description of the colonial administration and population of Tanganyika. See also the 1958 2nd edition.
  736. Find this resource:
  737. Zanzibar
  738.  
  739. Sheriff and Ferguson 1991 is a good introduction to Zanzibari history. Most of the recent scholarship on Zanzibar aims to better understand the complex blending of religious and ethnic identities that began in the pre-conquest era and continued under British rule. Fair 2001 does this through a focus on the social mobility of lower class women, while Bissell 2011 uses the prism of colonial urban planning. Glassman 2011 is an intellectual history of racial divisions on Zanzibar.
  740.  
  741. Bissell, William. Urban Design, Chaos, and Colonial Power in Zanzibar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.
  742. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  743. Written by an anthropologist, this book examines the chaos resulting from colonial urban planning directed at Zanzibar’s Stone Town.
  744. Find this resource:
  745. Fair, Laura. Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001.
  746. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  747. Focused primarily on women, this is a study of how former slaves improved their status in Zanzibari society over the course of the colonial era.
  748. Find this resource:
  749. Glassman, Jonathon. War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.
  750. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  751. Explores the origins of ethnic conflict in Zanzibar during the late colonial era.
  752. Find this resource:
  753. Sheriff, Abdul, and Ed Ferguson, eds. Zanzibar Under Colonial Rule. London: James Currey, 1991.
  754. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  755. A collection of essays with a general “materialist” focus that covers the entire sweep of Zanzibari history, from the abolition of the slave trade in the late 19th century to the post-colonial revolution on Zanzibar in 1964.
  756. Find this resource:
  757. Central Africa
  758.  
  759. Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company played the leading role in the conquest of British central Africa and administered the Southern and Northern Rhodesian colonies until the early 1920s. Consequently, Southern Rhodesia’s substantial settler community and the Northern Rhodesian mining interests exerted strong influences on British policy in the region. The African Lakes Company played the pioneering role in creating the Nyasaland Protectorate (Malawi). Nyasaland, which attracted relatively little European settlement, sent substantial numbers of African labor migrants to the Rhodesias and South Africa.
  760.  
  761. Northern Rhodesia (Zambia)
  762.  
  763. Roberts 1976 is a broad survey of Zambian history. Insights into the Northern Rhodesian settler community can be found in Rotberg 1977, and Ranger 1980 is an essay on the imperial culture of Northern Rhodesia. Most of the scholarly literature on British rule in Northern Rhodesia focuses on mining and the “Copperbelt.” Butler 2007 is an economic and narrative history of the copper mining sector, while Parpart 1983 explains how Africans became copper miners. The Great Britain Commission on Disturbances 1935 is an official explanation for the origins of labor unrest in the mining sector during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
  764.  
  765. Butler, L. J. Copper Empire: Mining and the Colonial State in Northern Rhodesia, 1930–64. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
  766. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  767. An archive-based study of the strategic and economic importance of the Copperbelt to Britain.
  768. Find this resource:
  769. Great Britain Commission on Disturbances in the Copperbelt. Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire into the Disturbances in the Copperbelt, Northern Rhodesia. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1935.
  770. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  771. The official government report on the causes of the widespread rioting that spread throughout the Copperbelt in the mid-1930s.
  772. Find this resource:
  773. Parpart, Jane. Labor and Capital on the African Copperbelt. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983.
  774. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  775. Explains how the colonial government and mine owners transformed subsistence farmers into copper miners.
  776. Find this resource:
  777. Ranger, Terence. “Making Northern Rhodesia Imperial: Variations on a Royal Theme, 1924–1938.” African Affairs 79 (1980): 349–373.
  778. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  779. Analyzes how the colonial government tried to build consensus for British rule in Northern Rhodesia around the ideal of an imperial monarchy. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  780. Find this resource:
  781. Roberts, Andrew. A History of Zambia. New York: Africana Publishing, 1976.
  782. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  783. A textbook that traces the history of the region that became Northern Rhodesia from the Stone Age to 1974.
  784. Find this resource:
  785. Rotberg, Robert. Black Heart: Gore-Browne and the Politics of Multiracial Zambia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.
  786. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  787. A biography and psychological study of the leader of the Northern Rhodesian Legislative Council and paternalistic champion of African rights. The book’s foreword is by Kenneth Kaunda, the first president of Zambia.
  788. Find this resource:
  789. Nyasaland (Malawi)
  790.  
  791. Duff 1903 is a descriptive narrative of the conquest and founding of the Nyasaland Protectorate. Mandala 1990 focuses on the impact of colonial agricultural and labor policies on peasant farmers, and Shepperson and Price 1958 is a pioneering history of how African grievances over these policies sparked one of the most famous anti-colonial uprisings in southern Africa. White 1987 is an innovative micro-history that covers much of the same ground by telling the story of a single village. Vaughan 1987 explores the sometimes tragic consequences of colonial policy by analyzing the causes and consequences of the famine of 1949–1950. Power 2010 is a political history of African opposition to British rule in the late colonial era.
  792.  
  793. Duff, H. L. Nyasaland under the Foreign Office. London: George Bell, 1903.
  794. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  795. The story of the founding of the Nyasaland Protectorate by one of its former administrators.
  796. Find this resource:
  797. Mandala, Elias. Work and Control in a Peasant Economy: A History of the Lower Tchiri Valley in Malawi, 1859–1960. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.
  798. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  799. An agricultural history of southern Nyasaland that explores how peasant farmers coped with colonial demands for their labor.
  800. Find this resource:
  801. Power, Joey. Political Culture and Nationalism in Malawi: Building Kwacha. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2010.
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  803. A comprehensive political history of Malawi in the colonial and early post-colonial era based on archival records and oral histories.
  804. Find this resource:
  805. Shepperson, George, and Thomas Price. Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting, and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915. Edinburgh: University Press, 1958.
  806. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  807. A classic study of John Chilembwe’s revolt against European estate owners and the colonial government during the First World War.
  808. Find this resource:
  809. Vaughan, Megan. The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in Twentieth-Century Malawi. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
  810. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511549885Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  811. A study of the role that colonial economic and agricultural policies played in the infamous famine of 1949–1950. Augments archival records with oral histories and songs.
  812. Find this resource:
  813. White, Landeg. Magomero: Portrait of an African Village. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
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  815. Tells the story of how a single community experienced some of the most significant events of Nyasaland’s colonial era.
  816. Find this resource:
  817. Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe)
  818.  
  819. Baden-Powell 1970 is a firsthand account of one of the British South Africa Company’s wars of conquest, and Kennedy 1987 explains how this charter company produced the settler-dominated colony of Southern Rhodesia. Chanock 1977 details how the British government plans to amalgamate the colony with the Union of South Africa never came to pass. Schmidt 1992 explains the consequences of settler colonialism for rural gender relations, and van Onselen 1976 is a history of the men who worked in the Rhodesian mines. Burke 1996 and West 2002 use studies of consumption and social mobility to map the limitations and opportunities of Southern Rhodesia’s racially segregated society.
  820.  
  821. Baden-Powell, Lord Robert. The Matabele Campaign, 1896: Being A Narrative of the Campaign in Suppressing the Native Rising in Matabeleland and Mashonaland. Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1970.
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  823. An account of the defeat of an uprising against the British South Africa Company, known alternatively as the Second Matabele War or the First Chimurenga, by the founder of the Boy Scout movement. A reprint of the 1897 edition.
  824. Find this resource:
  825. Burke, Timothy. Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.
  826. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  827. Uses soap, deodorants, and cosmetics to explore how conceptions of cleanliness legitimized British rule in Southern Rhodesia and how Africans became consumers and critics of western hygiene products.
  828. Find this resource:
  829. Chanock, Martin. Unconsummated Union: Britain, Rhodesia, and South Africa, 1900–1945. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1977.
  830. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  831. Drawn primarily from archival sources, a useful policy study of Britain’s various failed plans to amalgamate the Union of South Africa with Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Bechuanaland.
  832. Find this resource:
  833. Kennedy, Dane. Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1939. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987.
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  835. Covers the conquest of Southern Rhodesia by the British South Africa Company and the origins of its settler community.
  836. Find this resource:
  837. Schmidt, Elizabeth. Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870–1939. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1992.
  838. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  839. Explores how administrators tried to control African women’s sexuality and prevent the destruction of peasant households resulting from settler colonialism from undermining the rural male authority that was a cornerstone of indirect rule.
  840. Find this resource:
  841. van Onselen, Charles. Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1900–1933. London: Pluto Press, 1976.
  842. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  843. A labor history of the Southern Rhodesian mining industry from the perspective of African miners.
  844. Find this resource:
  845. West, D. The Rise of an African Middle Class: Colonial Zimbabwe, 1898–1965. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
  846. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  847. Explores how some Africans were able to achieve a measure of social mobility within the framework Southern Rhodesia’s institutionalized racial discrimination.
  848. Find this resource:
  849. Southern Africa
  850.  
  851. Having won the Anglo-South African War, the British government created the Union of South Africa in 1910 by combining the Cape and Natal colonies with the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. While this safeguarded Britain’s strategic and economic interests in the region by bringing South Africa into the Commonwealth as a dominion, granting the Union self-government gave Afrikaner nationalists, English-speaking settlers, and capitalist investors the means to disenfranchise and exploit the African majority. Consequently, Britain’s influence over South African affairs from the formation of the Union 1910 until it became a republic and left the Commonwealth altogether in 1961 was relatively limited.
  852.  
  853. The Union of South Africa
  854.  
  855. Beinart 1994 is a narrative history of 20th century South Africa. Rotberg 1988 provides an exhaustive treatment of Cecil Rhodes’s pivotal role bringing southern Africa under British control. Ally 1994 is an in-depth examination of the ties between the Bank of England and Rhodes’s peers and successors in the gold industry, and Crush, et al. 1991 shows that the South African mining sector depended on cheap migrant labor drawn from throughout southern Africa. Institutionalized discrimination against Africans in the Union helped keep labor costs down, and Dubow 1995 and Elphick 2012 explore the intellectual and religious origins of South Africa’s racist political and social order. Grundy 1983 explains why the South African government’s discriminatory policies did not hinder its ability to recruit Africans into its armed forces.
  856.  
  857. Ally, Russell. Gold & Empire: The Bank of England and South Africa’s Gold Producers, 1886–1926. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994.
  858. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  859. Drawn primarily from the Bank of England archives, this book uses gold and gold mining to explore the various roles that South Africa played in the larger economy of the British Empire.
  860. Find this resource:
  861. Beinart, William. Twentieth Century South Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
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  863. This highly accessible but scholarly survey provides a good introduction to 20th century South African history.
  864. Find this resource:
  865. Crush, Jonathan, Alan Jeeves, and David Yudelman. South Africa’s Labor Empire: A History of Black Migrancy to the Gold Mines. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991.
  866. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  867. Places the South African mining sector in a regional context by analyzing how the Union drew labor migrants from throughout southern Africa.
  868. Find this resource:
  869. Dubow, Saul. Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
  870. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  871. Explains how pseudo-scientific racism became a basis of institutionalized racism in South Africa and a legitimizing ideology for the apartheid state.
  872. Find this resource:
  873. Elphick, Richard. The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and Racial Politics of South Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012.
  874. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  875. Explores the complex role of Christianity in South African history to explain how it was used to both critique and justify racial segregation and discrimination.
  876. Find this resource:
  877. Grundy, Kenneth. Soldiers Without Politics: Blacks in the South African Armed Forces. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
  878. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  879. A history of African service in the South African military that ranges from the early days of the Cape Colony to the apartheid state’s wars in Angola.
  880. Find this resource:
  881. Rotberg, Robert. The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
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  883. One of the most scholarly, comprehensive, and current biographies of one of the key architects of British imperial rule in southern Africa.
  884. Find this resource:
  885. The High Commission Territories (Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland)
  886.  
  887. Known as the High Commission Territories because they were under the jurisdiction of a British High Commissioner based in the Union of South Africa, Bechuanaland (Botswana), Basutoland (Lesotho), and Swaziland escaped being swallowed up by South Africa because they were led by powerful African rulers who placed themselves under British protection, as reported in Chanock 1977. Kuper 1978, Crowder 1988, and Eldredge 2007 report how humanitarian pressure in Britain and skillful political maneuvering by the Tswana, Sotho, and Swazi peoples kept the British government from making good on its commitment to turn the protectorates over to South Africa under the terms of the 1910 union agreement. Jackson 1999 emphasizes how their ties and contributions to the empire helped the High Commission Territories remain out of South Africa’s clutches, but Dutfield 1990 shows that the British government placed its ties to the Union ahead of the interests of the three protectorates.
  888.  
  889. Chanock, Martin. Unconsummated Union: Britain, Rhodesia, and South Africa, 1900–1945. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1977.
  890. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  891. Explains why Bechuanaland did not become part of the Union of South Africa.
  892. Find this resource:
  893. Crowder, Michael. The Flogging of Phinehas McIntosh: A Tale of Colonial Folly and Injustice, Bechuanaland 1933. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988.
  894. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  895. Uses the controversy that erupted over reports that Tshekedi Khama had allegedly flogged a European for having relations with Ngwato women to show how the Ngwato regent managed to thwart the British government’s plans to incorporate Bechuanaland into the Union of South Africa against the wishes of its population.
  896. Find this resource:
  897. Dutfield, Michael. A Marriage of Inconvenience: The Persecution of Ruth and Seretse Khama. London: Unwin Hyman, 1990.
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  899. In 1950, the British government bowed to South African racial pressure and exiled Seretse Khama, who was the heir to the chieftainship of the Ngwato community, for the racial transgression of marrying an English woman. This slightly romanticized narrative recounts the incident from the perspective of Ruth and Seretse Khama.
  900. Find this resource:
  901. Eldredge, Elizabeth. Power in Colonial Africa: Conflict and Discourse in Lesotho, 1870–1960. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007.
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  903. Uses an analysis of formal and informal political discourse to uncover the strategies the Sotho people used to assert their autonomy and contest British and South African colonial domination.
  904. Find this resource:
  905. Jackson, Ashley. Botswana 1939–1945: An African Country at War. Oxford: Clarendon, 1999.
  906. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198207641.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  907. A comprehensive study of the impact of the Second World War on the people of Bechuanaland (Botswana). The book is also one of the best sources on Tswana service in the African Auxiliary Pioneer Corps, which served primarily in the Mediterranean theater of operations.
  908. Find this resource:
  909. Kuper, Hilda. Sobhuza II: Ngwenyama and King of Swaziland. New York: Africana Publishing, 1978.
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  911. Written by a noted anthropologist who eventually took Swazi citizenship, this sympathetic and uncritical authorized biography tells the story of how Sobhuza resisted South African influence and transformed Swaziland from a British protectorate into a sovereign nation.
  912. Find this resource:
  913. The Imperial Experience
  914.  
  915. The considerable diversity and vast territorial scope of the British Empire make it unwise, if not impossible, to write definitively about the nature of its rule in Africa. Individual perspectives in the form of published memoirs, autobiographies, and personal histories are a useful safeguard against the pitfalls of over-generalization. Offering key insights into the lived experience and day-to-day realities of British rule, firsthand accounts and post-retirement reminiscences provide an important balance to both official reports and scholarly histories.
  916.  
  917. Official Perspectives
  918.  
  919. Predictably, British published accounts of the empire far outnumber African ones. Colonial civil and military officers often spent their free time keeping journals and diaries and many were accomplished amateur historians. Workman 1937 expands on the great interest in the workings of colonial administration in Africa during the heyday of the empire, and the Radcliffe Press published a great many official memoirs, including Morley 1992, in the 1990s and 2000s. Parsons and Crowder 1988 is a scholarly editing of the diary of a Bechuanaland resident commissioner, while Johnson 2002 is a collection of personal recollections of the Kenyan civil service edited by a member of the Kenya Administration Club. Gavaghan 1999 also covers the Kenyan civil service. Meinertzhagen 1957 and Nunneley 1998 provide starkly contrasting perspectives on the nature of the colonial military in the early days of British rule and during the Second World War.
  920.  
  921. Gavaghan, Terence. Of Lions and Dung Beetles: A Man in the Middle of Colonial Administration in Kenya. Devon, UK: Arthur Stockwell, 1999.
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  923. A member of the Kenyan civil service, Gavaghan also helped run “rehabilitation camps” for Mau Mau prisoners in the late 1950s, and he played a central role in “Africanizing” the Kenyan administration in preparation for independence. This memoir provides Gavaghan’s version of these events and is remarkable for its frank discussion of his sexual contacts with Africans.
  924. Find this resource:
  925. Johnson, John, ed. Colony to Nation: British Administration in Kenya, 1940–1963. Banham, Norfolk: Erskine, 2002.
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  927. An extremely informative collection of the reminiscences of ninety-six former members of the Kenyan civil service. Topics include day-to-day life as a rural administrator, work in the Nairobi secretariat, Mau Mau, and the transfer of power.
  928. Find this resource:
  929. Meinertzhagen, Richard. Kenya Diary 1902–1906. Edinburgh: Oliver & Lloyd, 1957.
  930. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  931. Meinertzhagen took part in the British conquest of the East African highlands as an officer in the King’s African Rifles. His published diary includes unapologetic narratives of violence during the colonial government’s pacification campaigns against resisting African communities.
  932. Find this resource:
  933. Morley, John. Colonial Postscript: Diary of a District Officer, 1935–56. London: Radcliffe, 1992.
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  935. A collection of letters and diary entries by a lower level official who served in the administration of Nigeria, Eritrea, the Gold Coast, and as a military officer in the Royal West African Frontier Force.
  936. Find this resource:
  937. Nunneley, John. Tales from the King’s African Rifles. London: Askari, 1998.
  938. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  939. Recounting his time as an officer in a Tanganyikan battalion of the King’s African Rifles during World War II, Nunneley provides highly personal recollections of his service in Ethiopia and Burma that are markedly different from official histories of these campaigns.
  940. Find this resource:
  941. Parsons, Neil, and Michael Crowder, eds. Monarch of All I Survey: Bechuanaland Diaries of Sir Charles Rey. London: James Currey, 1988.
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  943. The diary of one of Bechuanaland’s most noteworthy and famously authoritarian colonial administrators edited by two distinguished historians of southern Africa.
  944. Find this resource:
  945. Workman, Alan. A Colonial Postmaster-General’s Reminiscences. London: Grayson & Grayson, 1937.
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  947. Refreshingly different from the typical administrative memoir, Workman’s reminiscences provide insights into the more mundane aspects of colonial rule, in this case the postal service, in Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda.
  948. Find this resource:
  949. Private European Perspectives
  950.  
  951. There was a profitable market for published memoirs and firsthand accounts of the empire in metropolitan Britain. Price and Long 1956 provides a female perspective on missionary activity in southern Africa. Kingsley 1899 is a travel narrative of British West Africa in the late 19th century, Selous 1969 describes the origins of Southern Rhodesia, and Grogan and Sharp 1972 is an account of a famous trans-continental expedition from the Cape Colony to Egypt. Some of the Britons who wrote of their African experiences visited British Africa in a semi-official capacity. The Colonial Office sent the author of Huxley 1931 to observe and comment on East African education, Leith-Ross 1983 was written by a self-trained scholar who advised the Nigerian colonial government, and Perham 1974 was written by an academic who had considerable influence in the Colonial Office. Cell 1976 reproduces extensive correspondence between a senior missionary and a retired administrator about the role of “native” trusteeship in colonial policy in Kenya.
  952.  
  953. Cell, John, ed. By Kenya Possessed: The Correspondence of Norman Leys and J. H. Oldham, 1918–1926. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
  954. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  955. Oldham was the secretary of the International Missionary Council, and Leys was a medical doctor and disgruntled former member of the Kenyan administration. Edited by an Africanist scholar, the correspondence is a conversation, which sometimes turns into a debate, about how to best defend Kenyan “natives” from exploitation by the settlers.
  956. Find this resource:
  957. Grogan, Ewart, and Arthur Sharp. From the Cape to Cairo: The First Traverse of Africa from South to North. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1972.
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  959. A firsthand account of an adventurer who gave substance to Cecil Rhodes’s ambitious plans to connect Britain’s African territories by walking from Capetown to Cairo at the turn of the 20th century. Grogan later became a wealthy land speculator in colonial Kenya. Originally published in 1902.
  960. Find this resource:
  961. Huxley, Julian. Africa View. New York: Harper Brothers, 1931.
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  963. Huxley, a prominent biologist and the brother of novelist Aldous Huxley, visited all of the territories in British East Africa in 1931 at the invitation of the Colonial Office’s Advisory Committee on Native Education. The travelogue includes commentary on colonial scientific research and African education.
  964. Find this resource:
  965. Kingsley, Mary. West African Studies. London: Macmillan, 1899.
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  967. A travel account of British West Africa in the late 19th century. Kingsley, a pioneering naturalist, was one of the few British women to visit Africa at this time who was not the wife of a missionary or government official.
  968. Find this resource:
  969. Leith-Ross, Sylvia. Stepping Stones: Memoirs of Colonial Nigeria, 1907–1960. London: Peter Owen, 1983.
  970. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  971. Leith-Ross was the widow of a young district officer in Nigeria who became an expert on the people and culture of the colony after her husband’s death. Edited by the historian Michael Crowder who also wrote the book’s introduction.
  972. Find this resource:
  973. Perham, Margery. African Apprenticeship: An Autobiographical Journey in Southern Africa. New York: Africana Publishing, 1974.
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  975. Perham, an academic who served as a high-level government policy adviser on African matters, visited southern Africa on a Rhodes Trust traveling scholarship in the late 1920s.
  976. Find this resource:
  977. Price, Elizabeth Lees, and Una Long. The Journals of Elizabeth Lees Price Written in Bechuanaland, Southern Africa, 1854–1883, With An Epilogue, 1889–1900. London: Edward Arnold, 1956.
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  979. These journals, which were edited by a South African scholar at Rhodes University in the 1950s, provide a woman’s perspective on the missions in southern Africa in the late 19th century. Price was the daughter of the noted missionary Robert Moffat and the sister-in-law of David Livingstone.
  980. Find this resource:
  981. Selous, Frederick Courteney. Sunshine and Storm in Rhodesia: A Narrative of Events in Matabeleland. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969.
  982. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  983. An account of the conquest of Southern Rhodesia. Selous is romantically recalled as a big game hunter, but he also was a social Darwinist who favored the extermination of the Ndebele community. Originally published in 1896.
  984. Find this resource:
  985. African Perspectives
  986.  
  987. African accounts of the pre-World War I era exist largely in translation. Boahen, et al. 2003 reproduces and comments on the writings of the exiled ruler of the Asante empire, while Mukasa 1904 is a missionary translation of a Gandan nobleman’s account of Edward VII’s coronation. In time, the colonial schools produced a literate class of Africans, and future politicians, who provide a small but significant response to British accounts of the empire. Kenyatta 1965 powerfully rebuts government and mission authority to define Kikuyu culture, and Kakembo 1947 pushes for more rapid political and economic progress in post-World War II East Africa. Kaggia 1975 is a memoir of the final decades of British rule in Kenya. Nkrumah 1957 and Kaunda 1962 are autobiographical accounts of the rise to power of the first African leaders of Ghana (the Gold Coast) and Zambia (Northern Rhodesia).
  988.  
  989. Boahen, A. Adu, Emmanuel Akyeampong, Nancy Lawler, T. C. McCaskie, and Ivor Wilks. “The History of Ashanti Kings and the Whole Country Itself” and Other Writings by Otumfuo Nana Agyeman Prempeh I. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
  990. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  991. The British authorities banished the Asante ruler Prempeh I to the Seychelles in 1900, when he refused their offer of protection. While in exile he wrote this history of Asante. Oxford University Press has reprinted it with commentaries by four prominent Asante history specialists.
  992. Find this resource:
  993. Kaggia, Bildad. Roots of Freedom, 1921–1963. Nairobi, Kenya: East African Publishing House, 1975.
  994. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  995. A memoir of a remarkable man who was a Kenyan veteran of the Second World War, the founder of an independent African church, a convicted Mau Mau subversive, and finally, a senior politician in independent Kenya.
  996. Find this resource:
  997. Kakembo, Robert. An African Soldier Speaks. London: Livingstone, 1947.
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  999. Written by a Gandan member of the East African Education Corps during the Second World War, this book, which was originally suppressed by the colonial authorities, is a remarkable manifesto of an African veteran’s expectations for the post-war empire.
  1000. Find this resource:
  1001. Kaunda, Kenneth. Zambia Shall Be Free. London: Heineman, 1962.
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  1003. The autobiography of the first African leader of Zambia (Northern Rhodesia).
  1004. Find this resource:
  1005. Kenyatta, Jomo. Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu. New York: Vintage, 1965.
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  1007. Originally Kenyatta’s London School of Economics masters thesis, the book challenges Kenyan governmental and mission authority by offering an alternative interpretation of Kikuyu custom and culture. Originally published in 1938.
  1008. Find this resource:
  1009. Mukasa, Ham. Uganda’s Katikiro in England: Being the Official Account of His Visit to the Coronation of His Majesty King Edward VII. Translated and edited by Ernest Millar. London: Hutchinson, 1904.
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  1011. Ham Mukasa accompanied the Katikiro (prime minister) of the Kingdom of Buganda to London for a royal coronation. Heavily edited by its missionary translator, this travel memoir still conveys a Ugandan nobleman’s perceptions of Edwardian Britain.
  1012. Find this resource:
  1013. Nkrumah, Kwame. The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah. London: Thomas Nelson, 1957.
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  1015. Nkrumah’s account of how he came to lead the first independent sub-Saharan African nation state.
  1016. Find this resource:
  1017. The End of Empire
  1018.  
  1019. In many ways, the loss of India after the Second World War made the British Empire more African. While the importance of Malaya increased as well, and the West Indian colonies remained secure, the Labour government looked to British Africa to provide the resources for post-war reconstruction and sufficient prestige and wealth to maintain Britain’s status as a global power. To this end, the Labour Colonial Office invested unprecedented levels of capital and administrative manpower in the African territories. This new experiment in development colonialism failed to produce the expected returns and mostly likely hastened the empire’s demise by intervening more deeply in the lives of ordinary people. The British government protected its economic and strategic interests in West Africa by putting the Gold Coast and Nigeria on the path to self-government and eventual independence. The politically powerful settler communities made this strategy impossible in the rest of British Africa. Throughout the 1950s, the colonial authorities sought to blunt the force of African nationalism through repression and limited, racially based constitutional concessions that disenfranchised the African majority. While these tactics appear obviously unworkable in hindsight, most colonial administrators, settlers, and African nationalists were caught off guard by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s declaration in 1960 that Britain would withdraw rapidly from its remaining African Empire. Darwin 1991 and Butler 2002 are narrative histories of the final decades of the entire British Empire suitable for students and non-specialist readers. Goldsworthy 1971 analyzes the impact of imperial issues on metropolitan British politics during this same period. For an Africa-focused survey of decolonization see Hargreaves 1996. Gifford and Louis 1982 and Lynn 2006 are edited collections that provide a more detailed treatment of the causes and effects of the transfer of power in Africa.
  1020.  
  1021. Butler, L. J. Britain and Empire: Adjusting to a Post-Imperial World. London: I. B. Tauris, 2002.
  1022. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1023. An accessible survey of the last decades of the British Empire that questions whether the empire was actually in “decline.”
  1024. Find this resource:
  1025. Darwin, John. The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1991.
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  1027. A short introductory review of the main explanations for the British Empire’s demise.
  1028. Find this resource:
  1029. Gifford, Prosser and William Roger Louis, eds. The Transfer of Power in Africa: Decolonization, 1940–1960. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982.
  1030. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1031. These papers were originally presented at a 1977 international conference. The topics of the chapters include the American role in the end of the British Empire, American Pan-Africanist critiques of the empire, comparisons between the British and French approaches to the transfer of power, and regional and territorial studies of the end of empire in West Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, Uganda, and South Africa.
  1032. Find this resource:
  1033. Goldsworthy, David. Colonial Issues in British Politics, 1945–1961. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971.
  1034. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1035. Still one of the very best studies of the influence of post-World War II imperial tensions, which were mostly Africa-related, on metropolitan British politics.
  1036. Find this resource:
  1037. Hargreaves, John. Decolonization in Africa. 2d ed. London: Longmans, 1996.
  1038. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1039. Unlike many surveys of late British imperial history, this textbook contextualizes the transfer of power in British Africa with the wider history of decolonization on the continent.
  1040. Find this resource:
  1041. Lynn, Martin, ed. The British Empire in the 1950s: Retreat or Revival? New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
  1042. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1043. A collection of essays that provide a new and refreshingly detailed look at the decade preceding the end of British rule in Africa. Topics relating directly to British Africa include the origins of the Central African Federation, mining interests, responsible government in the Gold Coast, and British policy in Nigeria.
  1044. Find this resource:
  1045. Development Colonialism
  1046.  
  1047. Morgan 1980 is an authorized official history of the British government’s development policies in the late 20th century. Kelemen 2007 usefully introduces and summarizes the post-World War II Labour government’s plans for African development. Seeking to circumvent resistance by colonial governors and senior officials to the new blue print for the empire, the Labour Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech-Jones began a series of summer conferences that aimed to convince a younger generation of administrative officers to help remake British Africa through central planning and state-directed development. (Great Britain Colonial Office 1949) These ambitious plans failed for a variety of reasons. Hogendorn and Scott 1981 shows that poor planning and simple incompetence derailed the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme, while Cooper 1996 demonstrates that the British blueprint for development was based on unrealistic assumptions about African workers. Lewis 2000 is a history of how the new initiatives were applied and ultimately failed in Kenya.
  1048.  
  1049. Cooper, Frederick. Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
  1050. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511584091Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1051. Covering both British and French Africa, this lengthy and meticulously researched study traces labor policy from the 1930s to independence in the early 1960s to explain the failure of development colonialism and the economic necessity of the transfer of power.
  1052. Find this resource:
  1053. Great Britain Colonial Office. Colonial Office Summer Conference on African Administration: Agricultural Development in Africa. Third Session, 15–27 August 1949. London: Colonial Office, 1949.
  1054. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1055. Details the Labour government’s plan to spark an “agricultural revolution” in the African colonies.
  1056. Find this resource:
  1057. Hogendorn, J. S., and K. M. Scott, “The East African Groundnut Scheme: Lessons of a Large Scale Agricultural Failure” African Economic History 10 (1981): 81–115.
  1058. DOI: 10.2307/3601296Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1059. An analysis of one of the greatest economic debacles of the development era. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  1060. Find this resource:
  1061. Kelemen, Paul. “Planning for Africa: the British Labour Party’s Colonial Development Policy, 1920–1964.” Journal of Agrarian Change 7 (2007): 76–98.
  1062. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1063. Usefully and succinctly analyzes the inspirations and motives of the post-WWII Labour government’s colonial development policies. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  1064. Find this resource:
  1065. Lewis, Joanna. Empire State-Building: War and Welfare in Kenya, 1925–52. Oxford: James Currey, 2000.
  1066. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1067. Shows that colonial planners based their development plans for Kenya on metropolitan Britain’s social engineering programs during and after the Second World War and that these plans floundered due to lack of funding and opposition from senior members of Kenya’s colonial administration who stilled believed in the pre-World War II methods of indirect rule.
  1068. Find this resource:
  1069. Morgan, D. J. The Official History of Colonial Development. 5 vols. London: Macmillan, 1980.
  1070. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1071. The most pertinent volumes for Africa in this state-supported history of the British government’s development policies in the post- World War II development era are: vol. 2, Developing British Colonial Resources, 1945–1951; vol. 5, Guidance Towards Self-Government in British Colonies, 1941–1971.
  1072. Find this resource:
  1073. The Planned Decolonization Debate
  1074.  
  1075. Seeking to devise a more progressive form of colonial rule, rebut American and Soviet anti-imperial rhetoric, and mollify African nationalists, the post- World War II Labour government sought to make local government in British Africa more inclusive and progressive, as described in Great Britain Colonial Office 1947 and Creech Jones 1951. Colonial governors and senior officials who began their careers in the inter-war era opposed these initiatives, but Robinson 1949 countered that Labour’s new administrative policies were not incompatible with the doctrines of indirect rule. Kirk-Greene 1979 shows how, decades after the end of British rule in Africa, senior imperials officials continued to claim that their primary goal had always been to transfer power to African nationalists after a suitable period of benevolent rule and trusteeship. Flint 1983 found evidence to support these claims in the archives of the Colonial Office, but Pearce 1984 countered that vague official statements supporting some form of limited self-government did not mean that Britain intended to surrender its empire.
  1076.  
  1077. Creech Jones, Arthur. “British Colonial Policy: With Particular Reference to Africa.” International Affairs 27 (1951): 176–183.
  1078. DOI: 10.2307/2606141Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1079. In this published address on Labour’s colonial policy, Creech Jones claimed that local self-government was the main objective of British rule in Africa. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  1080. Find this resource:
  1081. Flint, John. “Planned Decolonization and Its Failure in British Africa.” African Affairs 82 (1983): 389–411.
  1082. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1083. Argues that planning for decolonization began in the 1930s, thereby demonstrating that perceptions of British imperial weakness, American hostility to empires, and African nationalism had no bearing on the decision to grant the Gold Coast self-government in the 1950s. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  1084. Find this resource:
  1085. Great Britain Colonial Office. Summer Conference on African Administration: African Local Government, First Session. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1947.
  1086. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1087. The colonial secretary Creech Jones used this conference to promote the Labour government’s plan to defuse anti-imperial nationalism by diverting Africans political ambitions into local government.
  1088. Find this resource:
  1089. Kirk-Greene, A. H. M., ed. The Transfer of Power: The Colonial Administrator in the Age of Decolonisation. Oxford: University of Oxford Inter-Faculty Committee for African Studies, 1979.
  1090. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1091. In these published proceedings of a 1978 Oxford conference on the transfer of power in Africa, senior former Colonial Office officials and politicians argue that “nation-building” had always been the ultimate goal of British imperial rule.
  1092. Find this resource:
  1093. Pearce, R. D. “The Colonial Office and Planned Decolonisation in Africa.” African Affairs 83 (1984): 77–93.
  1094. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1095. Responds to Flint’s argument that the Colonial Office had a plan to decolonize Africa by demonstrating that the British government’s colonial policies were inconsistent, contradictory, and “muddled.” Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  1096. Find this resource:
  1097. Robinson, R. E. “The Member System in British African Territories.” Journal of African Administration 2 (1949): 51–59.
  1098. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1099. Robinson worked as a research officer specializing in “trusteeship” in the Colonial Office’s African Studies Branch before moving to a career in academia. Here he argues that the Labour government’s local government initiatives were consistent with the pre-World War II institutions of indirect rule.
  1100. Find this resource:
  1101. West Africa
  1102.  
  1103. An outbreak of civil unrest in the Gold Coast in 1948 led the Colonial Office to expand and accelerate its plans to grant the West African colonies self-government (Great Britain Colonial Office 1948, Killingray 1983). Rathbone 1992 and Lynn 2001 are edited collections of documents from the British National Archives showing how this policy shift led to the transfer of power in Ghana and Nigeria by the end of the 1950s. Nkrumah 1957 recounts the events that led to Ghanian independence, and Bello 1962 does the same for Nigeria. However, it was not an easy process to turn colonies into nation states. Allman 1993 shows that Asante nationalists resisted incorporation into Ghana, and Vickers 2010 tells the story of the failure of the British government to safeguard the interests of minority communities in Nigeria.
  1104.  
  1105. Allman, Jean. The Quills of the Porcupine: Asante Nationalism in an Emergent Ghana. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.
  1106. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1107. A study of the young Asante nationalists who resisted plans by Nkrumah and the Gold Coast colonial government to incorporate the pre-conquest Asante confederation into an independent Ghanian nation-state.
  1108. Find this resource:
  1109. Bello, Ahmadu, Alhaji Sir. My Life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1962.
  1110. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1111. The autobiography of the first premier of the Northern Region under the British government’s plan for a federal Nigerian nation state.
  1112. Find this resource:
  1113. Great Britain Colonial Office. Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Disturbances in the Gold Coast. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1948.
  1114. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1115. The British government’s official report on the causes of the 1948 riots.
  1116. Find this resource:
  1117. Killingray, David. “Soldiers, Ex-Servicemen, and Politics in the Gold Coast, 1939–50.” Journal of Modern African Studies 21 (1983): 523–534.
  1118. DOI: 10.1017/S0022278X00023545Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1119. Explores the influence of World War II veterans on Gold Coast politics and their role in the 1948 riots that spurred the colonial government into making constitutional changes that set the colony on the road to self-government. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  1120. Find this resource:
  1121. Lynn, Martin, ed. Nigeria. British Documents on the End of Empire. Series B. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 2001.
  1122. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1123. A collection of official documents from the British National Archives (formerly the Public Records Office) relating to decolonization in Nigeria; vol. 1, Managing Political Reform, 1943–1953; vol. 2, Moving to Independence, 1953–1960.
  1124. Find this resource:
  1125. Nkrumah, Kwame. The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah. London: Thomas Nelson, 1957.
  1126. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1127. Nkrumah’s account of the circumstances and events leading up to independence in the Gold Coast (Ghana).
  1128. Find this resource:
  1129. Rathbone, Richard, ed. Ghana. British Documents on the End of Empire. Series B. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1992.
  1130. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1131. A collection of official documents from the British National Archives (formerly the Public Records Office) relating to decolonization in the Gold Coast. Part I 1941–1952; Part II 1952–1957.
  1132. Find this resource:
  1133. Vickers, Michael. A Nation Betrayed: Nigeria and the Minorities Commission of 1957. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2010.
  1134. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1135. A study of the “Commission Appointed to Enquire into the Fears of Minorities and the Means of Allying Them.” The author argues that the commission’s main function was to ensure that minority groups in Nigeria did not disrupt the British government’s plans for rapid decolonization in Nigeria.
  1136. Find this resource:
  1137. East Africa
  1138.  
  1139. As recorded in the Uganda Protectorate 1950, the East African colonies also experienced outbreaks of unrest in the late 1940s. Seeking to reconcile African nationalist aspirations with settler colonialism, the Colonial Office promoted constitutional multi-racialism, which granted political representation to ethnic groups rather than individuals. According to Odinga 1967, this was unacceptable to Africans in Kenya because it continued settler minority rule. Listowel 1965 shows how dissatisfaction with the policy built support for Julius Nyerere and the Tanganyika African National Union. Mutesa 1967 and Walker 2009 are memoirs of how these events played out in Uganda, while Blundell 1964 and Ngugi 2012 do the same for Kenya. Branch 2009 is a balanced study of the Mau Mau revolt’s defeat and its long-term political and social consequences in Kenya.
  1140.  
  1141. Blundell, Michael. So Rough a Wind. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1964.
  1142. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1143. Although he played an active role in the suppression of the Mau Mau revolt, Blundell was a relatively moderate leader of the settler community. His memoir is an account of his reasons for coming to accept African majority rule in Kenya.
  1144. Find this resource:
  1145. Branch, Daniel. Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
  1146. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1147. Explains how the Kikuyu “loyalists” who opposed the Kenya Land Freedom Army during the Mau Mau rebellion came to dominate post-colonial Kenya.
  1148. Find this resource:
  1149. Listowel, Judith. The Making of Tanganyika. London: Chatto & Windus, 1965.
  1150. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1151. A short political history of Tanganyika by a special correspondent for The Times. The most useful sections relate to Julius Nyerere and the origins and rise to power of the Tanganyika African National Union.
  1152. Find this resource:
  1153. Mutesa, King of Buganda, II.. Desecration of My Kingdom. London: Constable, 1967.
  1154. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1155. Mutesa was the Kabaka (king) of Buganda during the last decades of British rule in Uganda. This memoir weaves details of his personal life with the failed political struggle to make Buganda a separate nation state.
  1156. Find this resource:
  1157. Ngugi, wa Thiong’o. In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir. New York: Pantheon, 2012.
  1158. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1159. The second book in a three-volume memoir of the famous Kenyan novelist that recalls the author’s secondary education against the backdrop of the Mau Mau revolt.
  1160. Find this resource:
  1161. Odinga, Oginga. Not Yet Uhuru: An Autobiography. London: Heinemann, 1967.
  1162. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1163. Odinga was one of the founding members of the Kenya African National Union, which became the ruling party after the transfer of power. This autobiography alternates autobiographical chapters with chapters narrating the history of Kenyan independence. The forward is by Kwame Nkrumah.
  1164. Find this resource:
  1165. Uganda Protectorate. Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Disturbances in Uganda During April, 1949. Entebbe, Uganda: Government Printer, 1950.
  1166. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1167. The colonial government’s official report on the causes of a significant outbreak of anti-imperial unrest.
  1168. Find this resource:
  1169. Walker, Patrick. Towards Independence in Africa: A District Officer in Uganda at the End of Empire. London: Radcliffe, 2009.
  1170. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1171. This memoir by a Kenya-born British district officer provides an administrator’s perspective on the last decade of British rule in Uganda.
  1172. Find this resource:
  1173. The Central African Federation
  1174.  
  1175. Hyam 1987 shows that neither the Labour nor Conservative leaders of Britain in the late 1940s and 1950s ever planned to withdraw from Northern or Southern Rhodesia. Instead, they created the Central African Federation (CAF), which combined the Rhodesias with the Nyasaland Protectorate, in an effort to block the spread of South African influence northward, placate the settlers, and protect British strategic interests, as described in Wood 1983 and Murphy 2001. Creech Jones 1953 explains how Africans in all three territories vehemently opposed the CAF because it denied their nationalist aspirations and institutionalized political and social racial discrimination. In 1959, according to McCracken 2011, the CAF security forces employed draconian measures to suppress anti-federation riots in Nyasaland, and a scathing report by a commission of inquiry into the violence helped end popular support for the CAF in Britain (Great Britain Colonial Office 1959). Herbert 2002 provides an intimate look at how these tensions played out in a rural district in Northern Rhodesia.
  1176.  
  1177. Creech Jones, Arthur. A Petition to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II Against Federation. London: Africa Bureau, 1953.
  1178. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1179. No longer the Colonial Secretary, Creech Jones returned to his role as a socialist critic of British imperial policy by helping a delegation of Nyasaland (Malawi) chiefs protest plans for the Central African Federation.
  1180. Find this resource:
  1181. Great Britain Colonial Office. Report of the Nyasaland Commission of Inquiry. Command Paper 814. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1959.
  1182. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1183. Also known as the Devlin Commission Report, this report of a commission of inquiry investigating the violent circumstances surrounding the declaration of a state of emergency in Nyasaland helped end public support for the Central African Federation in Britain by labeling Nyasaland a “police state.”
  1184. Find this resource:
  1185. Herbert, Eugenia. Twilight on the Zambesi: Late Colonialism in Central Africa. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002.
  1186. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1187. This is an engaging study of the end of British rule in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) from the perspective of the western districts of the colony, the capital of the Central African Federation in Salisbury (Harare), and London.
  1188. Find this resource:
  1189. Hyam, Ronald. “The Geopolitical Origins of the Central African Federation: Britain, Rhodesia and South Africa, 1948–1953.” Historical Journal 3 (1987): 145–172.
  1190. DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X00021956Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1191. Usefully summarizes the British government’s motives for creating the Central African Federation. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  1192. Find this resource:
  1193. McCracken, John. “In the Shadow of Mau Mau: Detainees and Detention Camps During Nyasaland’s State of Emergency.” Journal of Southern African Studies 37 (2011): 535–550.
  1194. DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2011.602894Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1195. A study of how the colonial authorities used Kenyan detention and rehabilitation tactics against the anti-federation nationalist movement in Nyasaland. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  1196. Find this resource:
  1197. Murphy, Philip, ed. Central Africa. British Documents on the End of Empire. Series B. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 2001.
  1198. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1199. A collection of official documents from the British National Archives relating to decolonization in the Central African Federation; Vol. 1, Closer Association 1945–1958; Vol. 2, Crisis and Dissolution, 1959–1965.
  1200. Find this resource:
  1201. Wood, J. R. T. The Welensky Papers: A History of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Durban, South Africa: Graham, 1983.
  1202. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1203. Roy Welensky was a settler leader in Northern Rhodesia and a primary architect of the Central African Federation. Based on Welensky’s personal papers, this book intersperses his biography with a political history of the rise and fall of the federation.
  1204. Find this resource:
  1205. The Wind of Change and the End of the Britain’s African Empire
  1206.  
  1207. Having already granted independence to Ghana and Nigeria, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s decision to withdraw rapidly from the rest of British Africa caught administrators, settlers, and Africanist nationalists by surprise, as recorded in Macmillan 1960 and Ovendale 1995. The essays in Gifford and Louis 1988 offer insights into the consequences of this policy shift in specific British territories. For the mission perspective on these events see Stuart 2011, and Parsons 2003 shows that the sudden rush to Africanize the King’s African Rifles led to mutinies in the new East African national armies. Refusing to accept African majority rule, as described in Ritscherle 2009, the Rhodesian settlers defiantly declared their independence from Britain, which led to a liberation war, covered in Martin and Johnson 1981, in the former British colony. Kirk-Greene 1979 provides a reassessment of these events nearly two decades after Macmillan’s “Wind of Change” speech.
  1208.  
  1209. Gifford, Prosser, and William Roger Louis, eds. Decolonization and African Independence: The Transfers of Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988.
  1210. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1211. As a sequel to the editors’ Transfer of Power in Africa (1982), the essays in this collection focus on the first decades of the independence era. Topics relevant to British Africa include: economic underdevelopment, independence in the Sudan, post-colonial Ghana, the transfer of power in Nigeria, Kenyan independence, democracy in Botswana, and the origins of Zimbabwe.
  1212. Find this resource:
  1213. Kirk-Greene, A. H. M., ed. The Transfer of Power: The Colonial Administrator in the Age of Decolonisation: Proceedings of a Symposium Held at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, 15–16 March 1978. Oxford: University of Oxford Inter-Faculty Committee for African Studies, 1979.
  1214. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1215. The published proceedings of a 1978 Oxford conference that brought together historians, politicians, and former members of the colonial civil service to discuss the reasons for the end of British rule in Africa.
  1216. Find this resource:
  1217. Macmillan, Harold. “Africa.” African Affairs 59 (1960): 191–200.
  1218. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1219. A published address by the British prime minister in which he acknowledged the legitimacy of African nationalism and argued that Britain’s withdrawal from Africa was the successful culmination of a policy intended to transform the colonies into independent members of the Commonwealth. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  1220. Find this resource:
  1221. Martin, David, and Phyllis Johnson. The Struggle for Zimbabwe: The Chimurenga War. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.
  1222. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1223. A pair of journalists provide a narrative account of the Zimbabwean war of independence.
  1224. Find this resource:
  1225. Ovendale, Ritchie. “Macmillan and the Wind of Change in Africa, 1957–1960.” Historical Journal 38 (1995): 455–477.
  1226. DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X00019506Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1227. A succinct and useful analysis of Macmillan’s motives for winding down the British Empire in Africa. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  1228. Find this resource:
  1229. Parsons, Timothy. The 1964 Army Mutinies and the Making of Modern East Africa. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.
  1230. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1231. Uses the simultaneous army mutinies in Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya to explain the challenges of turning British colonial military units into national armies.
  1232. Find this resource:
  1233. Ritscherle, Alice. “Disturbing the People’s Peace: Patriotism and ‘Respectable’ Racism in British Responses to Rhodesian Independence.” In Gender, Labour, War, and Empire: Essays on Modern Britain. Edited by Philippa Levine and Susan Grayzel. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
  1234. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1235. Explains why many metropolitan Britons supported Ian Smith’s decision to declare Southern Rhodesia an independent nation.
  1236. Find this resource:
  1237. Stuart, John. British Missionaries and the End of Empire: East, Central, and Southern Africa, 1939–64. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011.
  1238. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1239. Examines the changing role of missionaries in British Africa during in the two decades leading up to the transfer of power.
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