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By Root 1302 0

by British prisoners during the Second World War. In the camp at Hola, where those considered especially hard-core members were detained, there occurred a scandalous case when eleven prisoners were beaten to death, as the camp authorities attempted to force them to work. Initial attempts to hush up the incident collapsed after an inquest revealed the true causes of death. In the early days of empire, news of the events might never have reached London. But now, not only did Whitehall officials know what was being done in the name of the Mother Country, but politicians could express views on the subject. The House of Commons discussed the report into what had happened at the camp late one July night. The attack was led by the feisty Labour MP Barbara Castle, who accused the government of a ‘nauseating parade of complacency’ in its attempts to explain away what had happened. Then, at 1.15 in the morning, the Conservative Enoch Powell – once such a passionate believer in empire – rose. Powell was sickened by what he had heard. Mrs Castle had let the government – his own government – off lightly. In a speech which electrified an unusually crowded House, he went to the heart of why empire could not survive in the post-war world. ‘All government, all influence of man upon man, rests upon opinion,’ he told the MPs. It was simply impossible to have one set of standards for your behaviour at home and another for your behaviour in the colonies. ‘What we can do in Africa, where we still govern and where we no longer govern, depends upon the opinion which is entertained of the way in which this country acts and the way in which Englishmen act. We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility.’ He sat down, overcome with emotion.

In its setting and its impact Powell’s identification of the moral problem at the heart of modern-day imperialism echoed the criticisms Edmund Burke had made of the way that the East India Company behaved in the subcontinent. But his comments were delivered in an utterly changed world – a more intimate place, where news travelled fast and where Britain had a much diminished role. Indifference, the default setting for mid-twentieth-century feelings about empire, was not a foundation on which to attempt to maintain an imperium. It was not that anti-imperialism ever became a vastly popular political cause* – just that there was something in the air. To those who thought about it, the practice of imperialism seemed indefensible, and to those who didn’t think the question was ‘Who needs the bother?’ The only significant colonial territories where the idea of independence was problematical were those – like South Africa or Rhodesia – with an entrenched white population. For the rest, independence was something whose time had come: no one who wished to get anywhere in politics could claim to believe in anything other than international equal rights, however vaguely expressed. When the patrician old Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who had once been Colonial Under-Secretary, warned the South African parliament in February 1960 that ‘the wind of change is blowing through this continent’, he acknowledged as much. In Nigeria, later on the same tour, Macmillan asked the retiring Governor General, ‘Are these people fit for self-government?’ and received the reply ‘No, of course not.’ That would require another twenty or twenty-five years, said the official. ‘What do you recommend me to do?’ asked Macmillan. ‘I recommend you give it to them at once,’ said the Governor General. The alternative was that all the most talented people in the country would become rebels, and the British would spend the next two decades fighting to try to stave off what was inevitable, while incurring the opprobrium of the world. Nigeria left the empire a few months later, Sierra Leone and Tanganyika the next year, Uganda in 1962.

There was usually some member of the royal family present at the little ceremonies on dusty parade grounds when the flag was run down, acknowledgement