The Tank Hill Party”: Generational Politics and Decolonisation in East Africa
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Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission “The Tank Hill Party”: Generational Politics and Decolonisation in East Africa Edgar Taylor, CISA, Wits In November 1963, five young single white men – all British citizens aged between 23 and 32 – met at the Kampala Sports Club to plan a party for December 11th, the eve of neighbouring Kenya’s independence. They drafted an elaborate invitation card that read: “We the League of Ex-Empire Loyalists do request and require your presence, at a bottle Colonial Sundown on Wednesday December 11th, commencing at 9.00 p.m. to celebrate The End of the White Man’s Burden.” The dress code would be in the style of the iconic colonial apologia film, “Sanders of the River.” The location was to be “the neo- colonial style residence” of a British insurance salesman “(by his reluctant consent) on the quarry road, Tank Hill.” Guests were instructed to “R.S.V.P. by native bearer in cleft stick or tom-tom” or to “send a shrunken head” to any of the five men, who gave their home and office phone numbers alongside nicknames such as “Gin-sling”, “Let-them- eat-cake”, and “Churra Sahib.” The men arranged for a printing company to produce several hundred cards, in a hodgepodge of ornate fonts on fancy paper, which they then distributed to select friends and acquaintances. By all accounts, the party attracted between 150 and 200 Europeans, many of whom carried on in drunken merriment until 6 o’clock the following morning.1 Over the next three weeks, “the Tank Hill Party” would become the focus of visceral debates over the integrity of African sovereignty, the future of British presence on the continent, and the basis of postcolonial racial and generational hierarchies. Stories circulated around Kampala alleging that the partygoers sang songs mocking Africans, dressed a dog in the Ugandan and Kenyan flags, and dishonoured East African heads-of-state with offensive effigies among other acts. Members of the ruling Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC) Youth Wing declared the party an insult and a threat to the young nation’s independence. Politicians, journalists, civil servants, activists, and reading publics in Uganda, Britain, and across Africa questioned the organizers’ motives, speculated what actually transpired at the party, and debated how the Ugandan state should respond. As they did so, they exposed how the raw emotion of colonial injustice could threaten to dislodge a postcolonial elite’s moral authority, sever diplomatic relations between Uganda and Britain, and unsettle arenas of polite sociality through which Uganda’s independence had been negotiated. The Tank Hill Party provoked a collective recognition of the emotional wounds created by racial injustice at the heart of colonial governance and sociality.2 However, despite their disgust with the party, many Ugandan and British officials feared for the fragile bureaucratic and social orders through which they governed the country. A shared desire for administrative continuity and disdain for colonial culture led Prime Minister Milton Obote and British High Commissioner Sir David Hunt to mitigate the party’s damage to Anglo-Ugandan relations. Fourteen attendees, including the five organizers, were swiftly deported. When UPC Youth Wingers burned down the house 1 Rhodes House, Oxford (hereafter RHO) MSS Afr. s. 2195 Taylor [5]. 2 Timothy Parsons, The Second British Empire: In the Crucible of the Twentieth Century (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 233. 1 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission where the party was held, conservatives in Obote’s government cracked down on young radicals and reaffirmed demands for British aid and technical assistance. By attacking what they perceived to be the plebeian antics of both young Britons and young Ugandans, officials from both countries sought to uphold the contract through which Uganda had achieved independence in October 1962. In so doing, they tried to block youthful attempts to shape the parameters of postcolonial relations. Independence and Administrative Continuity For many Britons in the Overseas Civil Service, the private sector, and voluntary organizations in Africa, the formal end of colonial rule did not mark an immediate rupture in their professional lives. African civil services continued to recruit young Britons even as Africanization policies accelerated in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Tony Lawrence, a 27 year-old road engineer, landed a job in Kampala in 1958.3 The pay was nearly triple that of his previous salary in England and came with additional perks such as housing, a lower tax rate, and a pension. He had grown up in the industrial English port of Southampton and followed his father’s profession as a chartered surveyor and engineer. In an uncertain post-war economy, he felt pressure to move frequently. “If you stayed somewhere more than a year, you were almost a failure,” he recently recalled. The Overseas Civil Service offered no long-term job stability, but ambitious young people like Lawrence expected to move frequently regardless of where they worked. He took numerous jobs around southern England and then rapidly changed posts within Uganda, moving to Masaka in 1960 and becoming Town Engineer of Mengo in 1961, a position he continued to hold after Uganda’s independence. Countries like Uganda thus remained part of a wider geography where mobile young Britons could build their careers. British overseas civil servants at this time were assigned to assist with the promotion of African colleagues along a constantly accelerating timescale, which exacerbated the former’s anxiety about their future. Lawrence felt, “We were expatriate, but we wanted to give the locals independence, which we gave them slowly. But it was a mistake.” Newcomers like Lawrence entered the top of a late colonial racial hierarchy under strain from nationalist politics and the rapid promotion of African civil servants. Their older colleagues had more stable pensions, had longer relationships with Africans, and had seen political change coming over time. Longer serving officials thus concentrated their advocacy through the European Civil Servants Association around maintaining racialized pay scales and retirement benefits.4 Younger colleagues were often less diplomatic in how they expressed their views about Ugandan politicians and decolonization. Britain’s first High Commissioner to Uganda was appalled both by the numbers of Britons still in independent Uganda’s civil service and especially by “the younger and more footloose element … [that] cannot be persuaded to alter their old 3 Interview with Tony Lawrence, Bournemouth, 5 june 2016. 4 Uganda’s “European” and “Asiatic” Civil Service Associations each formed in March 1919 in response to the Colonial Office’s proposal to gradually build up a primarily African civil service. Nizar Motani, “The Growth of an African Civil Service in Uganda, 1912-1940” (Ph.D. thesis, SOAS, University of London, 1972), 108. 2 Edgar Taylor, WISER seminar, 24 April 2017 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission habits and ways of talking about Africans.”5 Thus while mobile young men like Lawrence were most invested in the day-to-day work of training African colleagues, their fleeting commitment to Uganda meant that many did not feel concerned about protecting their long-term security in the country by deferring to the changing political climate. Meanwhile, colonial commitment to Africanization was considerably less vigorous than the tide of political change. In October 1957, Governor Frederick Crawford reported to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, “There was a constant clamour for Africanization and if self-Government were to come in 10 to 15 years time, it was necessary to start now getting Africans in to the Civil Service as fast as possible, possibly by lowering standards slightly, while British tutelage was still available.” Crawford declared, “to hand over an efficient machine … some 25 years [i.e. the year 1982] would be best.”6 This policy did see increases in the number of Africans appointed to senior posts, rising from 5 in 1952 to 130 in 1961.7 However, as Crawford privately acknowledged by 1959, “The blunt fact is that political development is outstripping the development of the Civil Service.” As a result, he emphasized the need to retain and recruit “European staff who will not only have to carry the main burden of Government business but will also have to train the local staff to take over from them.”8 If the solemn transfer of the constitutional instruments of independence to Prime Minister Milton Obote on October 9th 1962 represented a dramatic transfer of sovereignty to a democratically elected African government, it also signalled commitment to administrative continuity. In the preceding years, Obote had used his position in the Legislative Council to push for the rapid Africanization of the civil service. In 1959, Crawford warned that the “Pan African emotionalism” of politicians like Obote could sabotage development efforts, undermine administrative efficiency, and ultimately require Britain to offer “capital and recurrent assistance” after independence. Obote, however, struck a more cautious tone as he assumed his new position. “We believe in a policy of appointing local people in the civil service to as high positions as they are available,” he told a Uganda Argus reporter. “But we will continue to refuse to appoint local people to high position just because they are local people.”9 At independence, Uganda retained upwards of 800 British civil servants in addition to hundreds of others employed on short-term contracts. Obote declared, “We need them desperately and it would disturb me if even one were to decide to leave.”10 Meanwhile, Britain’s new High Commissioner Sir David Hunt worried about ordinary British civil 5 BNA DO 213/41 Hunt to Walsh-Atkins [8], 3 january 1964.