Joanna Lewis

Nasty, Brutish and in shorts? British colonial rule, violence and the historians of Mau Mau

It was the summer of 1990 and my first Saturday morning in Africa. I had summoned my courage and rehearsed some basic Swahili before setting out alone on foot for central Nairobi. My goals were to avoid the ‘real’ Africa for the time being and simply purchase some fruits without being mistaken for a tourist. Twenty minutes later I was caught up in a mass riot and had run with a crowd from batonwielding police. These were Kenya’s multiparty demonstrations, the now legendary Saba Saba, and lives were being lost. Locked inside a shop for two hours, it was here that I first met the beautiful Martha Agatha Kimani, and it would be fair to say we ‘bonded’. She was 28, a mother of four daughters, and full of vitality and good humour. She was half-Kikuyu, half-Ethiopian. Her mother, forced to flee her homeland in a family dispute, had married a moderately well off Kikuyu farmer from Central Province who had gained land during the Mau Mau Emergency in the 1950s. He was mission educated. Martha and her two sisters had not been ‘circumcized’. He had enough money to pay for her school fees after the boys had been taken care of, sending her for the purpose to Nairobi. At 18 she was allowed to marry William, a university graduate who hailed from a less wealthy Kikuyu family. Both had uncles who had fought in the forests for Mau Mau and, later, returned from prison, embittered and much the poorer, the younger permanently deaf in one

Empires of Sentiment; Intimacies from Death: David Livingstone and African Slavery ‘at the Heart of the Nation’

The article re-examines the death of David Livingstone. It highlights the importance of an outpouring of disinhibited emotion in 1874. Despite a shambolic funeral, a working-class underdog and an anti-slavery tradition were placed ‘at the heart of the nation’. Media coverage generated the experience of intimacy from sentimentalised versions of Livingstones death and interactions with Africans, unleashing mass empathy, moral feeling and humanitarian impulse. It was crucial to the development of Britains soft-power empire liberalism, inspiring a powerful network, aware of public opinion, to later intervene in eastern Africa. Thus the role of emotion and emotion capital should be factored more into the history of empire.

Introduction to a special issue on empire and monarchy

The majority of the contributions to this special issue on Empire and Monarchy began life as papers presented at a conference in Durham in April 2002 entitled ‘Manipulating the Monarchy’. The fundamental organising principle was to bring together people interested in monarchy who were specialists in British national, regional and imperial history. Panels included the victorian monarchy, public values and popular perceptions. The papers with an imperial theme fell roughly into three categories: some dealt with the monarchy and empire in the context of metropolitan politics; several explored the complications surrounding colonial politics of monarchy both the imperial and the indigenous variety; others examined that wonderful phenomenon, the imperial royal tour, where monarchs and ceremonies veered dangerously out of control. One of the objectives of the non-British side of the conference was to draw attention to work being done on Africa, hitherto somewhat neglected; another was to consider the arguments contained within David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (2001). Although by the time of the conference, Cannadine’s work had been heavily criticised for its reductive thesis, an ignorance of much established imperial scholarship and its diminishing of race and racism, it was thought useful to test its general point of view against some specific case studies. A number of papers highlighted the complications surrounding monarchy in the imperial context, racial distinctions over class and the ways in which not only the British monarchy but also indigenous forms of ruling royalty could create extra tensions, anxiety and the possibility for subversion. An excess of good quality papers meant it was impossible to publish all of them in a single volume. A collection on metropolitan topics is being edited by my co-conference organiser, Dr A.J. Olechnowicz, and is due to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2006. This special issue of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History presents revised versions of some of the conference contributions on empire and monarchy together with additional papers which were subsequently commissioned to provide a wider range of case studies. It includes research by younger scholars as well as the work of more senior academics. I would like to thank Patrick Verdon for designing the conference website in the style of the Simpsons, all participants in the conference, the contributors to this special issue, those who had to be left out, and the editors of the Journal.

White man in a wood pile: race and the limits of macmillan's great 'wind of change' in Africa

On 21 January 1960, Harold Macmillan stepped off his plane at Lusaka Airport to begin a four-day tour of Northern Rhodesia. It was part of the first ever visit by a serving British prime minister to the empire in Africa. He was met by a persistent drizzle and a crowd of protestors, the latter forcing police to usher him into a car through a side exit.2 Most vocal were women from the Tonga-based Africa Nationalist Party. He never did quite escape them. They stood in pairs along the route of the cavalcade, along with other nationalist protestors, dancing and singing, whooping and waving. Placards read ‘No difference: South Africa and Federation’; ‘Give us 1 man 1 vote’.3 Amongst the airport throng had been a group of British journalists. When the band struck up ‘God Save the Queen’, Peregrine Worsthorne recalled how few Africans stood to attention or took their hands out of their pockets.4 He was Special Correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. From here on Macmillan endured a mixture of black protest and white rudeness. The following day he headed to the all-important Copperbelt region, one of the largest copper producing areas in the world. Six mines owned by two private companies, employed over seven thousand white workers as well as many thousands of Africans.5 One local newspaper reported that he was met by ‘soggy banners’ and a ‘half-hearted welcome’.6 Six Africans had lined his route from the local airport.7

‘The Old Pals’ Protection Society’? The Colonial Office and the British Press on the Eve of Decolonisation

As the 1950s drew to a close, there was a growing awareness on the part of British ministers and officials of the power of the media and the need for ‘news management’. As Harold Macmillan noted in his memoirs, by 1959 he and his colleagues fought elections in the company of two new developments: television and opinion polls.1 Yet there remained a tradition under which civil servants were expected to remain relatively aloof from the world of journalism, and ministers expected a degree of deference from the press. The Colonial Office (CO) in particular was keen to keep its own affairs from the critical scrutiny not only of the media but of Parliament itself, fearing that public disagreements about policy within the metropole would weaken the authority of its personnel in the colonies.2 In this regard the issues of press coverage and parliamentary scrutiny were closely interlinked. Through the mechanism of parliamentary questions, MPs may well have played a more significant role than journalists in holding the Government to account.3 Yet a large proportion of those questions were inspired by reports in the press, and ministerial replies could, in turn, encourage further investigations by the media.