Sir Glyn Jones: A Proconsul in Africa (review)

Baker’s biography of Glyn Jones, the last British governor of Nyasaland (Malawi), provides many rich details on the inner workings of the “official mind” during the waning days of empire in central Africa. The book is not for a generalist audience, however, given that it provides very little background information on the broader social, cultural, and economic developments in Nyasaland that influenced Jones’ decision-making as a representative of the Crown in the early 1960s.Baker’s study commends itself to Malawi experts with an interest in examining a political insider’s perspective on the country’s violent transition to independence.It also provides a number of intriguing anecdotes about the volatile personality of Malawi’s first leader, Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, and the troubling moral concessions that Jones made as he gradually surrendered power to a man who displayed an eagerness to redirect the authoritarian machinery of the colonial state toward the arrest, imprisonment, torture, and public execution of his rivals.

The book is structured around a standard chronological narrative.The first chapter traces Jones’ origins as the son of a lower-middle-class Welsh grocer from Chester and his rise to respectability through a program of careful breeding and education sponsored by his mother.Baker notes that Jones’ parents attended a Calvinist Methodist Church that conducted its services in Welsh, but they made a strategic choice to send their child to a nearby English-speaking congregation in an effort to train his accent for a higher social position.Family sacrifices secured the young Jones enrollment at a prominent day school and participation in the Duke of York’s youth camps.His academic and athletic successes subsequently opened a backdoor to Oxford – admission to a “non-collegiate” program in teacher training that was specifically geared toward men of humble upbringing.

As a university student, Jones let his studies suffer at the hands of a schedule largely structured around football matches, and he finished with only a third-class degree.As Baker notes, however, Jones’ lack of scholarly achievement did not hold him back from a career in colonial service.In 1931, when Jones was first appointed to the Native Affairs Department of Northern Rhodesia, recruiters still tended to regard “character” as a stronger indicator than demonstrated intelligence of an applicant's suitability for the tough conditions of a rural African posting.

Chapters two and three outline Jones’s career in Northern Rhodesia and summarize his postings to numerous outlying distrincts, including Gwembe, Mwinilunga, Balovale, Mongu, Ndola, and Petauke.While these pages occasionally offer engaging details about daily life as an isolated district officer – one memorable passage describes Jones trading bawdy jokes with a group of Catholic priests over bottles of mead – an Africanist will find them fairly sparse and disappointing. It is unfortunate that Baker relies almost completely on Jones’ personal diaries to reconstruct these years because it renders his portrait of his subject two-dimensional. Supplementary documentation collected from the National Archives of Zambia about the local events and conditions that shaped Jones’ administrative career might have allowed for a more textured analysis.For example, Baker notes that Jones developed into an ardent advocate of indirect rule, but he fails to examine how specific experiences, like Jones’ participation in the Balovale 1938 inquiry into inter-ethnic violence, shaped his perspective on traditional rule.

In chapters four through seven, Baker analyzes the difficult years that Jones faced following his promotion to governor of Nyasaland in 1960.Banda’s Malawi Congress Party (MCP) had recently organized massive popular protests against Nyasaland’s subordinate status within a territorial federation dominated by Southern Rhodesia’s racist white settler regime, and Jones was called in to manage a smooth transition to African self-rule. While these chapters provide some interesting details on the process of decolonization, Baker’s lack of attention to social, cultural, and economic background details once again places limits on his narrative.Baker does not discuss the potent issues of ethnicity and church allegiance that divided Nyasaland’s nationalist movement into competing...