'Change of Masters': The Sudan Government British Pensioners' Association and the negotiation of post-colonial identities

Introduction

Although the flow of scholarship on the social and cultural impact of decolonization on metropolitan Britain has increased since Stuart Ward asserted in 2001 that “No attempt has been made to examine the cultural manifestations of the demise of imperialism as a social and political ideology in post-war Britain,” there has yet to be extensive treatment of the experiences of returning colonial administrators, both during decolonization and before.¹ As Frederick Cooper has observed about this gap in the scholarship, “The disappearance of the category of colonial empire is fundamental to the erasure of the people who once received so much attention and who once saw themselves as representing the fusion of metropole and colony, the human dynamic of an imperial process.”² So this scholarly silence has mirrored a cultural silence. C onsidering that Britain’s colonial administrators were, in a sense, the civil servants sine qua non for two nations, Britain and the one in which they served, one rewarding place to start correcting this is with the bureaucratic mechanisms of association that existed between employer and employee, particularly at the moment of retirement.³ Pensions and pension terms constitute the one continuing relationship between employer and employee long after the work itself is finished. Although it may seem difficult to believe now, it was expected that the new government of a newly independent ex-colony bear the burden of paying the pensions of their colonial masters once they had sent them home. As a result, not only was there, in all likelihood, a residual relationship between the two nations that would extend into the post-colonial era, but the personal relationship between colonizer and colonized was never cleanly severed at the moment of independence, either. Indigenous administrators who had been underlings now became the guardians of pension benefits for the British retiree. Furthermore, the imperial discourse that maintained that these administrators had been servants of the colony and not of the metropole meant that any demands from them for pension assurances directed at their other employer, the British Government, were potentially awkward.

In this essay, I look specifically at the Sudan Government British Pensioners’ Association (SGBPA) and its struggle to fix pension terms for the British ex-administrators of the Sudan, whom I will call Anglo-Sudanese.⁴ In the process, I will explore the significance attached to those terms, not only financially but also as markers of their identity, as servants of the state and as individuals. Pension arrangements of British members of the Sudan Government were weighted with meaning that went beyond the practical concerns of financial security in their old age. The Sudan gained its independence in 1956, very early on in the period of decolonization; and so the timing of this meant that the resulting pension struggle of the Anglo-Sudanese took place in the rapidly changing Britain of the 1950s and 1960s, where the characterizations of Empire and imperial participants were constantly being manipulated by both critics and supporters. In the case of the SGBPA the process of self-catagorization in this highly charged environment was aided – for its individuals – by participation in the group, or by the choice to let others participate on one’s behalf. Although there was a very practical reason for the formation of the Association, I would argue that the processes of social identity formation that can be mapped over the course of a twenty year campaign were compulsory for emotional and psychological reasons, regardless of their stated economic and political goals. The SGBPA was the only organization that represented all Anglo-Sudanese in Great Britain and elsewhere (almost 100% membership rate). Consequently, it provided contextual continuity between colony and metropole and its formation was as much about creating a space in which the reputation, prestige and identity of individuals could be maintained by the group and selectively displayed in public, as it was about the manipulation of public opinion towards a new collective metropolitan identity acceptable to those individuals.⁵

So although m y analysis addresses the actions of Anglo-Sudanese in a specifically collective environment...