Good Second Class: Memories of a Generalist Overseas Administrator

Having recently reviewed for this journal Trevor Clark's excellent compendium, The Last Generation of Nigeria's Turawa (Bristol, 2002), I was keen to cast an eye over his memoirs. I relaxed and dug in, expecting a bright and breezy romp. It turned out to be anything but. Indeed, it was hard and heavy going and required two attentive readings. Having been buffeted in the course of my first reading by a curious, heavily congested, quasi-telegraphic, almost shorthand style, albeit packed with informative detail, I was baffled. Then gradually the light dawned. Clark had produced what in fact he had been doing with great efficiency and economy all his working life as a colonial administrator: an extended, if in this instance somewhat randomly organized, "minute." Having deduced this, translated the vast assortment of acronyms and shorthand identities, and then pondered the meanings to be derived from the content, I had a second go. This time I fared better.

What now was revealed was a fascinating tale that provides an honest and penetrating account detailing much more than the mere activities (exhaustive and exhausting as these were) of a skilled, dedicated, and loyal administrator who served in three of Britain's last-remaining colonial possessions: Northern Nigeria, Hong Kong, and the British Solomon Islands Protectorate. Clark is of that not-so-small band of "committed improvers" who sought to bring a glimmer of light into the darker reaches of colonial administration. That this was not always appreciated by his superiors in the field and in Whitehall, particularly during this downbeat period of colonial disengagement, is amply demonstrated.

Still, distressing and depressing as, inevitably, Clark's tale is, his tenacious hold on practical, commonsense human values, his caring, his humor, and his determination to maintain these values and this outlook when confronted with bleak prospects and unrelenting pressure "from above" do credit not only to Clark, but indeed to the best of that common heritage left by Britain's colonial civil servants. Clark cared for "his people," and he worked skillfully and incredibly hard for them. The problem was that time had moved on. All too often what his superiors, under hasty, often ill-informed, and politically motivated orders from Whitehall, required of him was—not to put too fine a point on it—two-timing, misrepresentation, and betrayal. Clark had to swallow hard to comply with these orders. And before doing so he often spoke his mind to the superior concerned. This did not make him popular with the local colonial establishments.

In Northern Nigeria, where he served for twelve years (1948–60), this apparently resulted in his banishment from the Kaduna secretariat after, among other things, he gave some frank, unprejudiced advice to the latter's Whitehall replacement, Gawain-Bell, whose job was to get the North to accept independence, by whatever means. As one of Clark's colleagues put it, "Tinkerbell has cast himself in the role of Mountbatten [the outgoing British Viceroy of India], and he's playing it to perfection" (150). Clark's last tour was at Okene, regarded by most as a "punishment station" (151).

In Hong Kong Clark's "African populist" approach to policy and practice seemed to inspire something between bemusement and contempt among the British Mandarins. "One might think," said Clark, "we were there to make the world safe for shippers and bankers—the grocers on whose advice, and by whose consent, the Ordinances were made that the Secretariat concocted and the legal department drafted" (164). The last thing in the minds of HK and Whitehall proconsuls who governed this "Pearl of the Orient" was to introduce anything more than a superficial covering of freedom and democracy, or indeed anything that might lead to greater consideration, protection, and involvement of ordinary Chinese in government.

Stifled by the claustrophobia of HK, Clark made his final move to the British Solomon Islands Protectorate (BSIP). Here, for the last five years of his career, he found rather more than a demanding challenge. It was a situation not unlike the one he had confronted in Northern Nigeria, only in microcosm and in extremis. During the 1970s Whitehall became increasingly desperate to rid itself of the islands. They were absorbing much revenue from the U.K. exchequer and producing little—an unacceptable reversal of the traditional mantra that each colony must support itself. In seeking to achieve some semblance of this objective, Clark, elevated to acting governor, appeared to be making slow progress. As in Northern Nigeria, he knew that people and institutions needed time to experiment and adapt. Time, however, was not available. Whitehall proceeded with a hatchet job on the Solomons which, by comparison, made colonial disengagement in Nigeria look like a gentlemanly affair. In the fallout, Clark was forced to leave, and retirement from the Colonial Service soon followed. The year was 1977. Clark was 53.

For the informed and persistent there is a fascinating, poignant, indeed reassuring and very human life story here. From the viewpoint of the Africanist, not only does it provide useful information and confirmatory reflections on all the standard Northern Nigerian and indeed broader late colonial contentions, it also provides a strong impressionistic portrait of "conceptual carry-over." We are able to see and appreciate how informed, usefully adapted initiatives by this old Africa hand contributed, even if only in a small way, to the governance of other "twilight" imperial territories. Indeed the British colonies benefited from many of these cross-fertilizations, by many of its servants, over a very long period. Clark was one of its last carriers.