British Tropical Africa

BRITISI-I TROPICAL AFRICA R. CouPLAND I C ONSTITUTJONAL developments in the Commonwealth of Nations and in India have occupied so much of the public stage since the War that the main fac'ts and problems of those two sections of the British Empire are relatively wellunderstood. But there is a third section which is not' so often in the limelight and about which most people in Great Britain know little and most people in the Dominions (so I am told) know scarcely anything at all. Yet it is a world in itself, this ~lColonial" or HDependent" Empire: it covers more than three million squ.are·miles, .a bigger space than Europe; it contains over sixty million inhabitants, six times the population of Canada; and _ among them are representatives of most of .the varied races which make up mankind-white men, black men, brown tnen, yellow men, Europeans, Africans, Arabs, Indians, Malays,· Chinese, Polynesians. Scattered over continents and oceans, its manifold and diverse communities have nothing to unite them, nothing in which they all share, except their common allegiance to the British crown or their common subjection in different degrees and ways to the ultimate control of the British parliament. It is this part of the Empire with which our young post-War critics· are apt to be most impatient. They can tolerate the Commonwea:lth. They can appreciate the meaning of our connection with India. But as regards our so-called cc tropical possessions'' the old prejudices die hard. Many high-minded people are still inclined to 55 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUA~TERLY I regard thes~ "colonies" of browns or blacks in much the same light as Cobden regarded white colonies in Canada and elsewhere a century ago-as disreputable relics of the ancien·regime. You remember how Cobden, writing in 1836-he was then just thirty-two- classed the colonies with the army and navy, the church, and the corn laws as "impurities" belonging to "aristocratic government" of which J ohn Bull had got to "purge his house." For "aristocratic" read "capitalistic," and the old claptrap seems curiously modern. But the reiteration ofother and older. people's formulas can scarcely be congenial to the rising generation; and for this section of the Empire, as much as for the others or more so, they will want, I expect, to examine the facts afresh and to ask those pnmary questions-what is it and what is itjor? II To deal with those questions, except in very general terms, over the whole field of the Colonial Empire would be impossible in a single article: so I propose to limit myself to one part of it- the group of territories under British rule in mid-Africa, that huge belt of country between the Sahara and the Zambesi. Conditions in that part, of course, are different from conditions in other parts: it is Africa, the others are not; but, since they are all (except the naval stations like Gibraltar, Malta, or the Falkland Islands, which are a class by themselves and need not concern us now) in tropical or sub-tropical areas, all inhabited mainly by coloured and politically more or less backward peoples, and all under British rule, the dominant facts and ideas about them are broadly the same. The situation in British Malaya is not so very unlike that in British Tropical Africa. Though more than 56 BRITISH TROPICAL AFRICA gulfs of space divide them, British rule in Nigeria or the Sudan cannot be something quite different in principle from British rule in Fiji or Ceylon. If, therefore, I attempt an interpretation only of that African part of .the Colonial Empire, it can be applied, in essentials and mutatis mutandis~ to the whole. What, then, is British Tropical Africa? In the west, it _consists of the Colonies of Nigeria, Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, and Gambia, with adjacent protectorates and strips of mandated territory. In the centre of the con- . tinen t, secluded from the sea, there are 1n the nort~ the Sudan (which is under an Anglo-Egyptian condominium) and the Uganda Protectorate; and in the south the Protectorates of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. In· East Africa there are...