Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [83]
If British East Africa is really to become a ‘white man’s country’ – which most of the settlers seem to think it should be – then it would be better to limit its territory, as far as possible, to those regions which are fit for European settlement. The outlying areas, which are manifestly only suitable for negro occupation, would more advantageously be placed within the boundaries of a territory that may ultimately be developed as a truly African State.*
It was high-handed stuff. In fairness, many of the whites in what became Kenya turned out to be pretty successful as farmers, becoming wealthy growing tea and coffee. But they then consolidated their position by creating a (whites-only) legislature which passed laws imposing hut taxes and banning others from growing coffee. Similar things were happening in Rhodesia, but to a rather different class of white settler. While Kenya was for the upper classes, Cecil Rhodes’s creation offered to many of the servicemen demobilized at the end of the Second World War land and wealth they could never have found at home, with vast swathes of the best land reserved for them. To give a sense of what this meant, the Land Tenure Act of 1969, a statute which purported to offer a fairer division of the spoils between whites and blacks, meant that Rhodesia’s 250,000 white people could now own only as much land as five million black citizens.
This promotion of white settlement in the twentieth century might have been comprehensible at the height of the empire, for it offered agricultural development and the creation of a cadre of imperial loyalists. But it was at odds with the proclaimed political purpose of twentieth-century empire: by the 1920s, the fashionable belief was in ‘custodianship’ of less developed lands. In 1923, the Colonial Secretary declared that ‘primarily Kenya is an African territory, and His Majesty’s Government think it necessary definitely to record their considered opinion that the interests of the African natives must be paramount, and that if, and when, those interests and the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail’. The writing was on the wall. When Kenya broke free of the empire in 1963, the white community learned the lesson that the white community in Zimbabwe – the site of Cecil Rhodes’s grave – were to discover a few decades later, that efficiency in production cannot defy majority rule for ever.
This did not become a problem in those places where the indigenous population had been either entirely wiped out or reduced to such pitiful states that the settlers encouraged by Britain could do more or less as they pleased. Canada, Australia and New Zealand had been the destination of the majority of British migrants. None of these territories had been white before the arrival of colonists, of course, but they could all become attractive destinations to help solve a recurrent political anxiety in Britain. The industrial revolution had turned the country into the first state in modern history in which most of the population lived in smoky, overcrowded cities that seemed to breed sickly citizens. The open spaces of empire stood in bright and breezy contrast. In the 1830s, for example, a young man named Edward Gibbon Wakefield had devised a theory for exporting surplus population. Wakefield was no great figure of probity (at the time he was in prison for abducting an heiress) but his idea