Cooperative Rule: Community Development in Britain's Late Empire 9780520381896

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Cooperative Rule

BERKELEY SERIES IN BRITISH STUDIES Edited by James Vernon 1. The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain, edited by Simon Gunn and James Vernon 2. Dilemmas of Decline: British Intellectuals and World Politics, 1945–1975, by Ian Hall 3. The Savage Visit: New World People and Popular Imperial Culture in Britain, 1710–1795, by Kate Fullagar 4. The Afterlife of Empire, by Jordanna Bailkin 5. Smyrna’s Ashes: Humanitarianism, Genocide, and the Birth of the Middle East, by Michelle Tusan 6. Pathological Bodies: Medicine and Political Culture, by Corinna Wagner 7. A Problem of Great Importance: Population, Race, and Power in the British Empire, 1918–1973, by Karl Ittmann 8. Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History, by Andrew Sartori 9. Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern, by James Vernon 10. Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire, by Daniel I. O’Neill 11. Governing Systems: Modernity and the Making of Public Health in England, 1830–1910, by Tom Crook 12. Barbed-­Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1976–1903, by Aidan Forth 13. Aging in Twentieth-­Century Britain, by Charlotte Greenhalgh 14. Thinking Black: Britain, 1964–1985, by Rob Waters 15. Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain, by Kieran Connell 16. Last Weapons: Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890–1948, by Kevin Grant 17. Serving a Wired World: London’s Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital, by Katie Hindmarch-­Watson 18. Imperial Encore: The Cultural Project of the Late British Empire, by Caroline Ritter 19. Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism, and Empire, by Emily Baughan 20. Cooperative Rule: Community Development in Britain’s Late Empire, by Aaron Windel

Cooperative Rule Community Development in Britain’s Late Empire

Aaron Windel

UNIVERSIT Y OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2022 by Aaron Windel Some of the material in chapters 1 and 2 appeared in different form as part of the following chapters in edited collections: “Mass Education, Cooperation, and the ‘African Mind,’ ” in Modernization as Spectacle in Africa, ed. Peter Bloom, Stephan Miescher, and Takyiwaa Manuh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014); “Cooperatives and the Technocrats; or, ‘the Fabian Agony Revisited,’ ” in Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation Building between the Wars, ed. Laura Beers and Geraint Thomas (London: The Institute of Historical Research/University of London Press, 2012); and “The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment and the Political Economy of Community Development,” in Empire and Film, ed. Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (London: British Film Institute, 2011). The author thanks the ­editors and publishers of those collections.

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Windel, Aaron, 1976– author. Title: Cooperative rule : community development in Britain’s late empire / Aaron Windel. Other titles: Berkeley series in British studies ; 20. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2022] | Series: Berkeley Series in British Studies ; 20 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021021908 (print) | LCCN 2021021909 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520381872 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520381889 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520381896 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Community development—Great Britain—20th century. | Cooperation—Great Britain—20th century. | Great Britain—Colonies— Administration. Classification: LCC HN400.C6 W55 2022 (print) | LCC HN400.C6  (ebook) | DDC 307.1/40941—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021908 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021909

Manufactured in the United States of America 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my parents, Rebecca and William

C onte nt s

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1. Cooperative Rule

19

2. Pedagogies of Community Development

61

3. Anti-­empire, Development, and Emergency Rule

94

4. Uganda’s Anti-­colonial Cooperative Movement

112

5. Cooperatives and Decolonization in Postwar Britain

142

Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

xi

175 183 239 255

I llus tratio n s

1. Batu Seblas Co-­operative Rice Mill Society, Ltd., Kelantan, Malaya, 1950  98 2. Electrified cotton ginnery near Kampala, Uganda  101 3. A farmer has his cotton weighed at a ginnery in Uganda, 1955  105 4. “A Colour Bar at a Co-­op?,” Daily Mirror cartoon, July 1960  168 5. Anti-­Apartheid Movement leaflet for the month of boycott, March 1960  170 6. United Kingdom Information Office window display, Dar es Salaam, 1960  180

ix

Ac knowle dgm en ts

I would never have been able to write this book without the support I have received from my teachers and mentors at the University of Minnesota. Anna Clark, my PhD adviser, shaped me as a scholar and was the one who first suggested that of the several threads I had uncovered in my dissertation research on community development in the British empire, I should write a book about the cooperative movement. I have benefited so much from Anna’s friendship and willingness to offer sage advise and critique as the project evolved since then. Allen Isaacman introduced me to the social history of Africa and profoundly influenced my thinking on development and colonialism. I was lucky to have been in seminars led by Patricia Lorcin and Thomas Wolfe and to have had conversations with both that have made an imprint on this book. Over the years I have been incredibly fortunate to have friends to talk with about this book and themes related at conferences, in living rooms, and via phone calls and emails, or who checked in and cheered me on to finish it. Thanks to Timothy Alborn, Laura Beers, Ellen Boucher, Corrie Decker, Mehmet Dosemeci, George Gathigi, Robb Haberman, Caley Horan, David Madden, Marc Matera, Julia Musha, Radhika Natarajan, Susan Pedersen, Eric Richtmyer, Nathan Sain, Jeff Schauer, Jennifer Thomson, Amy Tyson, Andy Urban, Janet S. K. Watson, and Elizabeth Williams. I am grateful to colleagues who took time to share ideas and ask good questions, gave encouragement, offered feedback on chapter drafts and conference papers, or otherwise sent me in good directions: Jordanna Bailkin, Jeffrey Byrne, Aaron Jakes, Nahum Karlinsky, Susan Kent, Prakash Kumar, Derryl MacLean, Stephan Miescher, David Morton, Nicole Sackley, Priya Satia, Andrew Sartori, xi

xii     Acknowledgments

Simon Stevens, and Thomas Spear. Thanks especially to Laura Beers, Peter Bloom, and Lee Grieveson, who edited articles of mine near the beginning of the project before I really knew where it was going. Holly Hanson read big chunks of the book and shared resources and immensely valuable insights on late-­colonial politics in Buganda. I am grateful to her. I am grateful to the archivists at all the archives in which I have worked during the course of this project, with special thanks to the archivists at Bishopsgate Institute Special Collections in London and the Zanzibar National Archives, who went above and beyond in helping me locate material. University of California Press and the Berkeley Series in British Studies have been a pleasure to work with. James Vernon was an amazing series editor. He read drafts of chapters as I completed them, gave fantastic feedback, and set up great challenges for me. Thanks to Niels Hooper for guiding the manuscript through review and for guiding me through the final revisions, and thanks to Enrique Ochoa-­Kaup and Robin Manley for their assistance preparing the manuscript. Thanks as well to Jon Dertien and Sharon Langworthy for help in editing and finalizing the manuscript for publication. My deepest thanks to Susan Pennybacker and the other anonymous reader for UCP. Both offered much-­appreciated interventions and detailed maps for revision. I wrote a lot of this book at home in Vancouver and was privileged to be able to draw on the support of a wonderful group of colleagues and friends. In the History Department at Simon Fraser University I am especially grateful to my writing group colleagues Roxanne Panchasi, Nicolas Kenny, and Evdoxios Doxiadis, who read a lot of the manuscript in its roughest stages and helped me think through how to put it all together. I also wish to thank Tina Adcock, El Chenier, Willeen Keough, Thomas Kuehn, Mark Leier, Emily O’Brien, Bidisha Ray, Jennifer Spear, Ilya Vinkovetsky, and Sarah Walshaw. My warm thanks as well to Vancouver friends Laura Ishiguro, Dimitris Krallis, Jack Little, Eryk Martin, the late Robert McDonald, Lara Campbell, and Nicole Vittoz. I have the best sisters and brothers. Keenan, Megan, Nathan, Lauren—thank you all. My loving parents, William and Rebecca, have cheered me on and supported me always. Finally, Chantal Norrgard has been there for me throughout the writing of this book with love and support and has helped me in immeasurable ways.

Introduction

This book is about how the cooperative movement came to occupy the center of colonial development and its spectacle of community-­driven rural modernization in the late British empire.1 It traces the long colonial career of an idea to use cooperatives—that is, formally organized groups that join together for a common purpose, pool their resources and share risk, and redistribute gains to members— as part of a strategy of imperial rescue and colonial rule. The book tracks how that strategy evolved and moved as a technopolitics from its roots in late nineteenth-­ century British India to eventually triumph as empire-­wide development policy in the postwar Labour government, coinciding with the rise of community development. Community development rose to prominence in the middle decades of the twentieth century as a cluster of theories and practices of development that addressed a decolonizing Global South. Its meanings, practices, and aims were diverse. It was not solely a feature of British colonialism. It was deployed by imperial states and Cold War superpowers as well as by emergent postcolonial states, though to very different ends. For colonial powers, community development fit in their repertoire of development techniques designed to stabilize colonial rule. Against that usage, African and Asian postcolonial states used community development strategies to break free from European domination, and community development was a common thread linking efforts at national economic development as part of the international Third World Non-­Aligned Movement, which arose after the Bandung Conference of 1955.2 Community development’s defining claim was that it was supposed to help the predominantly rural communities of the late colonial and postcolonial world unlock their own latent capacities for improvement and modernization. Cooperatives were often part of community 1

2     Introduction

development, and they were especially important in its late imperial British conception and practice. “Cooperative rule” grasps the entanglement of the cooperative movement with colonial systems. I take it from a comment made by Lord Frederick Lugard, former colonial governor of Nigeria and refiner of the theory and practice of British indirect rule in Africa, in a preface he wrote for Claude Strickland’s Co-­operation for Africa (1933). In that book Strickland, formerly in charge of the influential Cooperative Department in Punjab in India and later apostle for colonial cooperatives for the wider British empire, made the case that colonial governments should “reconstruct” African society using cooperatives. While praising Strickland’s ideas, Lugard wrote that he wished he could rebrand indirect rule as “Cooperative Rule.” What he meant was that cooperatives were a modern economic and social formation that leveraged already existing community ties and could be easily grafted onto what he understood to be “traditional” African society; that kind of grafting work to stabilize the old society so as to gradually transform it was, for Lugard, the very essence of indirect rule.3 He was echoing earlier claims, going back several decades, from practitioners of indirect rule in India who thought there was a natural affinity between cooperative organization and village communities there.4 I use Lugard’s phrase “cooperative rule” both to underscore the connection between colonial cooperatives and techniques of indirect rule and to evoke something beyond Lugard’s intended meaning, since for him indirect rule was synonymous with benevolent British trusteeship. I want to emphasize instead how in labeling it that way—cooperative rule—Lugard had inadvertently suggested the key truth about cooperatives in British colonial development: they were designed to rule—that is, to dominate, to govern from a hierarchical position above. This was political technology (a technopolitics) wielded by colonial power and used to support empire. In this book, then, I use the phrases “cooperative rule” and “cooperative development” interchangeably as shorthand for the British effort to promote and control (through law and administrative systems) cooperatives of various kinds in colonial territories.5 Strickland was the major theorist involved in elaborating the strategy, and Lugard was one of the many British officials and experts on colonial government won over by it. In tracking cooperative rule as it was transferred from British administrations and early community developers in India to new places in Africa and Asia, I take stock of the colonial situations in which cooperatives were called upon to solve crises that authorities saw as threatening the colonial order. In doing so I survey the dynamic fields of politics that cooperative development entered during late colonialism and decolonization, and I think about how colonial ideology was embedded within this new domain of development knowledge and planning. Although I survey the workings of cooperative development in India, Malaya, and the British-­ruled League of Nations mandate of Palestine, I focus especially

Introduction    3

on cooperative rule in East Africa, where the British had extended the reach of their empire by the turn of the twentieth century to Zanzibar, Kenya, and Uganda and, after World War I, to the former German-­colonized Tanganyika territory as a League of Nations mandate. In the region, as elsewhere in Africa and Asia, the British saw the future of colonial development in terms of extracting agricultural commodities. Cooperative development was applied to work with that overarching strategy, but the British also conceived of cooperatives as a means of shoring up British systems of rule against political challenges. From the 1920s through the 1960s officials in the colonial territories themselves and in London looked on worriedly at growing political formations and movements that took aim at British colonial rule, including Garveyism, varieties of African nationalism and internationalism, and communism. There were moments of panic in British officialdom about challenges to indirect rule growing among the Chagga in the Kilimanjaro region of northern Tanganyika in the 1920s, a rising anti-­colonial movement among the Kikuyu around the main zone of European settler-­colonial power in Kenya, and an independence movement in Uganda that was growing especially strong among the Ganda in the 1940s. The British feared that these and other African political movements would one day coalesce into a massive front against British imperial rule. Development thus presented one part of a strategy to combat those political challenges, so the whole story of the official efforts to spread the cooperative movement needs to be viewed as part of a strategy of imperial rescue. In tracing the story of cooperative rule, I call attention to how the colonial ideology embedded in it could be contested and subverted by anti-­colonial movement builders who envisioned cooperatives differently, both tactically and as part of their postcolonial development imaginaries.6 I explore that subversion of cooperative rule in detail in the middle chapters of the book in the story of Uganda’s anti-­colonial cooperative movement. In Uganda in the late 1940s and early 1950s a movement of cotton and coffee farmers used cooperatives to pose a powerful challenge to colonial authority and to the British-­structured colonial economy, which the farmers’ movement decried as racist, and to imagine an alternative pathway for cooperative development. To defend their position, the British imposed emergency powers in ways that brought cooperative rule fully into the repressive toolkit of Britain’s end-­of-­empire authoritarianism. My purpose, then, is to trace the evolution of cooperative development as rule to explain why it was that anti-­ colonial movements could easily recognize it as such and combat it accordingly, while late imperial Britons, captivated by the spectacle of British community development, were usually only capable of seeing cooperatives in the colonies as authentically democratic. In the final chapter I show how cooperatives came to symbolize British colonial development in the postwar moment in Britain and how Britons refracted their view of empire through a broadly shared enthusiasm for the cooperative movement, making postwar Britons only more inclined to see

4     Introduction

colonial rule as an agent of democratic change even as cooperative development merged, in Africa and elsewhere, with emergency rule.7 A key factor that helped to move colonial development plans for cooperatives from their evolution as a colonial technopolitics to their position in the foreground of Britons’ postwar colonial development imaginary was the cooperative movement’s position as a pillar of culture in modern Britain. The cooperative movement in Britain had grown in parallel with the rise of industrial capitalism, connected to working-­class self-­help strategies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Unlike most of the cooperatives advanced later by colonial community developers, which tended to be agricultural producer cooperatives, in Britain the movement had always centered on consumer cooperation. Some of the first cooperatives were cooperative flour mills and retail clubs, established by the urban poor in Britain in an effort to get a cheaper price for bread and to fight back against profit-­seeking millers and shopkeepers. Starting in the 1820s, similar working-­class projects were infused with the utopian socialism of the wealthy industrialist turned humanitarian Robert Owen, whose legacy would remain strong in the British cooperative movement throughout its subsequent history.8 Owen believed that social transformation toward a more equitable society would come about not through a revolution that toppled the capitalist ruling class but through a gradual training of the character of individuals—and eventually society at large—in principles of cooperation. He thought these should be taught and practiced in “Villages of Unity and Mutual Cooperation” (such as the short-­lived one he founded in New Harmony, Indiana).9 While Owenite intentional communities did not last, there was staying power in Owen’s conceptual framework of proliferating spaces of cooperative practice to gradually transform society away from self-­interest and profit and into socialism. His followers founded shops in Britain that tried to put his ideas into action, and Owenite shops and similar cooperative stores were one part of the repertoire of working-­class movement building popular before and during the Chartist movement of the 1830s–1840s.10 The decline of Chartism led some to search for gradual solutions to grow socialism and empower the working class, and it was in that political dynamic that the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society in England’s industrial north was formed by a group of men that included flannel weavers, Chartists, and Owenites.11 Because the Rochdale Pioneers laid out a set of principles that were taken up by others, as the cooperative movement grew into a national consumer movement during the second half of the nineteenth century, it was the Rochdale shop that got worked into the movement’s lore as the true original co-­op. In turn, fidelity to the Rochdale Principles became the test of whether a cooperative was authentic or not. There were eight principles: democratic control (each co-­op member had one vote regardless of share size); membership open to all; fixed and limited interest on capital; distribution of the cooperative’s surplus as a dividend in

Introduction    5

proportion to a member’s purchases; cash trading; pure and unadulterated goods; commitment to education; and political and religious neutrality.12 As the cooperative movement grew internationally—with societies of various types around the world linked up through the International Cooperative Alliance, founded in London in 1895—the spirit of the Rochdale Principles was revered even if some of the code’s provisions applied only to consumer societies. The Rochdale Pioneers were turned into founding fathers of the international movement. Even where the specific forms of cooperation had very distinct local origins completely disconnected from what was happening in Britain in the 1840s—as in Europe, where the cooperative movement centered more on urban and rural modes of producer rather than consumer cooperation, whether in agricultural credit, marketing, or other forms—their cooperators “never tired of singing the praises of the British movement and its founders.”13 Though the consumer shop was its center, the British cooperative movement became much more than a network of shops. In the later nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries the co-­op held a prominent place in the social and cultural life of nearly every city and town in Britain and was a central part of the labor movement.14 The consumer movement formed its own institutions to connect its multitude of shops. The Cooperative Wholesale Society (CWS) and its Scottish equivalent linked most shops in Britain to a central provider of grocery goods and other merchandise, extending its supply chains into the British empire and beyond. The Cooperative Union became the major cultural and educational entity of the movement, printing propaganda to spread the movement and convening a national congress of cooperators each year starting in 1869. While ­societies were supposed to remain politically neutral according to the code of Rochdale, the movement as a whole entered party politics decisively in 1917 with the formation of the Cooperative Party.15 Annual Cooperative Party conferences brought together delegates from political committees of the individual societies. A close alignment grew between the cooperative movement and the trade union movement, strengthened by agreements after World War I that made the Labour Party and the Cooperative Party (also referred to as the Co-­op Party) a united force in elections and a joint presence in Parliament. Even Fabian socialists, enthralled by technocratic modernization and convinced that the state needed to be the main agent of change, saw cooperatives as integral to the future worker and consumer democracy that they envisioned.16 It was also the Fabians who made sure cooperatives were part of the labor movement’s paternalistic approach to the empire.17 Fabian socialist Sidney Webb, secretary of state for the colonies under Labour’s second brief government (1929–1931), was instrumental in setting up the first attempts by the Colonial Office to spread and control a cooperative movement in Africa. Britain’s postwar Labour government solidified the place of cooperatives at the center of British long-­term plans for colonial development.

6     Introduction

Fabians were again influential at the Colonial Office and in Parliament (through their Fabian Colonial Bureau) and pushed to create or expand rural bureaucracies of cooperative publicity, registration, and supervision throughout the empire. Under Labour’s 1945 government the Advisory Committee on Cooperation in the Colonies was set up to monitor and advise from London and to serve as a central hub of information about the progress of “the movement.” At this point it would be very easy to misconstrue (as many late imperial B ­ ritons did) what was happening with cooperative development in the British empire in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Seeing the anchoring of the cooperative movement in working-­class struggles in Britain and socialist Labour secretaries of state for the colonies invested in that history taking action to spread the cooperative movement to Africa and Asia and other parts of the empire, we might conclude that during the postwar moment, when the Labour Party reached the height of its political power, it got to work trying to undo the negative forms of colonial power (including colonial capitalism) that had been spread by the British empire to new places in the modern era, trying to build democratic socialism in their place. The idea that cooperatives could work with British systems of colonial power is awkward given the popular meanings about democracy that are usually attached to the movement, but it should really not be surprising given the British cooperative movement’s long history, in which it was largely at peace within capitalism. To be sure, there was always a utopianism attached to the movement, and in the writings and speeches of many of its leaders an avowed anti-­capitalism (this was true even through the postwar era covered in this book). Cooperators dreamed that they would create a democratic society, built on socialist principles, that moved out and up from many local neighborhood democracies of the co-­op to wider national and international horizons. After the 1890s their utopian dream increasingly went under the banner of “The Cooperative Commonwealth,” which meant socialism.18 And yet the movement was always ameliorative and reformist in its approach to how to change society, aiming to adjust communities to industrial society and striving to gradually improve material conditions. Most cooperators and cooperative movement leaders had no desire to challenge capitalism by democratizing the work process, especially not in British cooperative movement’s factories and plantations in the empire, where surpluses were won and competitive advantage gained by exploiting workers terribly and where the co-­op participated alongside capitalist firms and colonial states in transforming ecosystems of colonial territories to make them work with the logics of the imperial economy.19 And what about the various forms of cooperatives started up by European settlers in colonial territories? There was nothing anti-­capitalist in a settler farmers’ cooperative organizing, cartel-­like, to pay workers in area as little as they possibly could on their farms (on occupied land, procured for them by the law and order of a colonial state, backed by the powerful British military). Yet that

Introduction    7

was a very common way in which settler colonialism spread the cooperative light in Africa, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. Given its long history of working within capitalism—­and indeed colonial/imperial capitalism—without challenging its base of accumulation, it is not surprising that in the British empire cooperatives could work with colonial rule. To understand what made the cooperative movement so appealing to British community developers concerned with colonial rule, however, we have to appreciate the connection that colonial officials, missionaries, and others in the development knowledge complex of empire in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries made between the problem of social change and the problem of colonial order. In India, Southeast Asia, and Africa, to rule was to preserve order, which meant managing social change. As Karuna Mantena argues, that impulse started in India in the second half of the nineteenth century, when techniques and governing doctrines of imperial rule broke with earlier nineteenth-­century liberal and moral discourses about empire’s purpose. Where empire’s earlier imperative had been to catalyze change in Indigenous society, and domination was justified as essential for moral and material progress, in the later nineteenth century British officials and the experts whose works they read started to see social change, or more precisely the pace of it, as a fundamental problem. Violent resistance to the British empire, such as that in the 1857 Rebellion, was determined to be the result of rapid change and the tearing of social fabric in what was, in anthropological analyses of the day, termed “traditional society,” theorized as “a cohesive, cultural whole that likewise was seen to resist the logic of modern society.”20 The important theorist here was Sir Henry Maine, whose writings became influential in recasting the underpinning rationalities of British rule. Maine argued that “native society” and its communal and customary basis of organization were in dissolution, and “the village community” needed to be protected from the encroaching new forces of social change. British rule was partly to blame. Its new regimes of private property and tax and encroachments of commerce and a market society, Maine thought, had accelerated a pattern of social change that in other places (such as Europe) had been slow and gradual.21 The pattern of social change was inevitable, but if British rulers wanted to avoid the unknown catastrophes of too-­rapid social change, they needed to find ways of slowing the pace of change to village communities. As Mantena writes of the influence of Maine in formulating indirect rule as it would be applied in India and later in Africa, “Indirect rule involved a new ‘alibi for permanent protective rule’ premised on the British empire as “simultaneously cause and cure for the crisis of native society.”22 The exact sources and nature of that crisis would continually shift, but the primary task of empire now became the search for solutions to “halt the collapse of native societies” and contain the crisis, which “presented a wholly new rationale for empire, and implied a new framework for the structure of imperial rule.”

8     Introduction

It was in this new structure of rule that colonial administrators sought cooperative solutions, starting at the end of the nineteenth century in India and continuing through their ascent to empire-­wide policy by World War II. Where we find community developers and cooperative boosters among government experts and others worried about rapidly changing “native society,” we need to see that thought pattern as flowing from colonialism’s dominant ideology and that r­ ationality—or “alibi” as Mantena puts it—of rule. It is easy to find echoes of Maine’s reasoning about “native society” in crisis in the pages of Cooperative Department reports from India and from their counterparts in Africa, in exchanges between Colonial Office experts and rural developers, and in records chronicling the missionary-­ government collaborative efforts at systems building in the field of education in Africa, where cooperatives were worked into pedagogy. It is at the heart of Lugard’s formulation of “cooperative rule.” Other elements flowed into that grand project of rule. Ideas to develop and “reconstruct” society using cooperatives ended up entwining three strands of thought on how and in what specific directions to guide social transformation in Africa and Asia via community development. First was the aforementioned overarching logic of indirect rule as a practice of slowing the pace of change and finding mechanisms to direct it in order to stabilize the colonial order. Second was a new twentieth-­century colonial-­modernist approach to using systems, science (experts), and rural bureaucracy to execute that project of rule.23 Third was an older tradition present in the cooperative movement from the beginning in its Owenite roots—namely, the project of creating and proliferating self-­help spaces for the training of individual character as a generator of gradual, nonrevolutionary social reconstruction.24 The first attempts to work with cooperatives as part of indirect rule came out of the early twentieth-­century technoscience of development deployed by the Indian Civil Service (ICS) and its rural administrative machinery, and especially that perfected in Punjab Province during the first quarter of the twentieth century. There ICS officials tried to use cooperatives to reconstruct society in order to gradually train an idealized peasantry drawn from a population of mostly Muslim cultivators, whom the colonial state determined were plagued by not only hopeless levels of debt to Hindu moneylenders but also an “instability of character” and lack of economic fluency that only the cooperative movement could cure. In the specific context of Punjab and in other parts of India, officials looked to adapt the rural credit societies that had been started in Germany starting in the 1860s by Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen. The Raiffeisen societies targeted indebted small farmers, and besides being a means of producer rather than consumer self-­help, they modified the Rochdale script in two key ways: rather than pledging share capital to become members, members of these rural co-­ops went in with unlimited liability, pledging their farms, their stock, or their farming tools; in addition, rather than paying a dividend, the co-­op’s capital on savings deposits and loan repayment

Introduction    9

was put back into a reserve fund to enable the society to continue lending.25 Taking the Raiffeisen prototype and believing that rural cultivators in India were too simple to follow it without close oversight and control, the ICS then crafted a rural bureaucracy of cooperative publicity, registration, and supervision that officials believed would be a panacea to rescue peasants from debt, shape peasant character, and reconstruct rural society in ways that supported colonial rule and aligned with British ideals of colonial modernity. This was the Owenite concept of character formation through the inculcation of cooperative practice, but what the ICS was trying to produce were loyal subjects of the empire, and it was trying to cure a social instability through rural reconstruction that the ICS worried, if left uncured, would produce dangerous threats to colonial order. The work of the ICS made colonial cooperation one of the big community development ideas of interwar imperial Britain. As it was copied by other colonial governments, it straddled several colonial fields of administration and development knowledge: “native education,” agricultural management, and marketing law. The British system, which was meant to promote and supervise all types of cooperatives even if its early efforts focused on rural credit, was often discussed in international development circles and at the League of Nations, sometimes alongside other efforts at similar concepts of cooperative organization like the sociétés de prévoyance promoted by French governments in Africa.26 Strickland was the important figure in moving the ICS’s cooperative system into international development discourse and into usage by the Colonial Office and colonial governments in Africa and Asia. He spent most of his career in Punjab Province’s Cooperative Department, helping to oversee its growth at the start of the twentieth century from a new administrative unit into one of the main development agencies in the province. When he retired from the top position of Cooperative Registrar at the end of the 1920s, he embarked on a second career as a traveling expert and apostle for colonial cooperative development, arguing for how the ICS’s model of cooperation, perfected in Punjab, could be adapted for “agriculturists” everywhere in the British empire. His study and advisory tours covered a wide swath of the empire that included visits to Malaya in the eastern Indian Ocean, Palestine, Zanzibar off the coast of eastern Africa, Tanganyika Territory in East Africa, and Nigeria and British Cameroon in West Africa. As a result of his tours and his writings and lectures, Strickland played a key role in establishing how cooperative development was talked about in journals and in venues in London where imperial administrators, academics, missionaries, and philanthropists mingled and planned how they would together develop Africa and Asia. He is an early example of the kind of “circulating expert” who would become the staple personnel of the international development framework during the Cold War.27 Strickland’s first stop was Malaya, a place that, like the rest of the Indian Ocean world linking South Asia with Southeast Asia and eastern Africa, had been

10     Introduction

dramatically transformed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by European imperialism and colonial capitalism. The Indian Ocean’s interconnected regions had been linked by empire in new ways through flows of capital and industrial resources and commodities, the mass migration of labor (in various forms of bondage or indenture), as well as by the circulation of anti-­colonial politics (emanating especially from India and the rising nationalist movements there starting in the 1920s).28 Malaya had been turned into a plantation colony under British rule. Many thousands of Tamil migrant workers arrived each year to work on the large European-­owned rubber plantations, while much of the land held by Malay and Chinese smallholders was also dedicated to rubber trees. British colonial officials oversaw a system that made Malaya an immensely profitable colony but produced tremendous inequality and left most people without rights. Looking on anxiously at the rise of nationalism in China and India and the growing popularity of anti-­colonial politics of various forms, officials turned their attention to development and welfare in hopes of staving off revolution, and Strickland was brought in to advise on how to grow a cooperative movement. The common thread running through all of Strickland’s missions and in the social analysis he produced was that political crises—whether looming in the future or exploding in the moment—stemmed from problems with rural societies that were suddenly faced with “modern conditions.” This conviction was shared by many British colonial officials of his day. To escape such crises, Strickland argued, colonial states needed to develop cooperative movements to reconstruct individuals (because character problems, namely the lack of thrift, were always at the root), groups, and society at large. His ideas were influential in the Colonial Office and with high-­level officials in colonies and territories ruled by Britain. In 1930 Strickland was recruited to go to Palestine to advise on how to apply cooperatives to fix an Arab rural debt crisis that officials believed had been the primary structural cause behind a weeklong Arab uprising the year before that involved attacks on Jewish settlements. Strickland confirmed what other officials in Mandatory Palestine already believed: that the problem of Arab debt that led to loss of land and then to violence stemmed ultimately from flaws in Arab character; these could only be fixed with cooperative tutelage working a gradual transformation of individuals and groups. Cooperatives, placed under close control of the colonial state, had to uphold colonial order. An ironclad rule for Strickland and for officials who adopted his ideas was that however the cooperative movement was allowed to take form in a British territory, it needed to support the already existing frameworks of colonial rule. These varied from place to place and often hinged on promoting the power of certain groups over others, all to keep the steady stream of agricultural commodities flowing. In Zanzibar, a plantation colony almost entirely dedicated to clove growing, the British were determined to uphold the power of Omani Arabs

Introduction    11

as a landholding caste and as employers of African plantation workers (many of whom were descendants of slaves who had been brought to the island from mainland East Africa before slavery was formally abolished in 1897). Interwar officials in Zanzibar worried that increasing levels of Arab indebtedness to Indian lenders and consequent loss of land would mean instability in the colony’s structure of political authority. Strickland was brought in to advise on how that problem of rule might be fixed through a cooperative credit movement especially targeting Arab landholders. Following a similar logic of needing to stabilize British rule, though in a very different context of indirect rule in the League of Nations mandate Tanganyika Territory, Strickland was enlisted to set up a legal framework for cooperation that the government hoped would help to suppress a politicized cooperative movement that had already started to grow among the Chagga coffee farmers of Kilimanjaro—a movement that British officials worried was undermining the political power of the chiefs who were employed as government officials under the British system. Colonial governments and the Colonial Office had specific uses for framing cooperative laws and administrative systems in order to meet political and social crises at hand, and during his tours Strickland helped governments to see even more potential for carving out a new agency to oversee cooperative movements. The onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s added extra urgency. Strickland’s tours coincided with the global collapse in many agricultural commodity prices, and on one level the argument for colonial cooperatives was made on the grounds that it was an inexpensive way of doing development and meeting rural people’s rising expectations that the British should deliver on social welfare (as all the official interwar arguments for “trusteeship” claimed the British should). Strickland urged forward-­thinking administrators in Africa to see that popular demands for social welfare would only continue to increase in the future, and if they wanted to meet those demands without spending much money on development, colonial governments needed to make cooperatives “the ‘core’ of a welfare policy.” A Cooperative Department, he promised, was a “less expensive agency” that could “spread the teaching of a skeleton staff of experts . . . among the villages and will organize the people to put this teaching into practice.”29 Arguments like these were appealing to colonial governments that were then imposing severe austerity programs presented as emergency recovery plans. As Moses Ochonu documents in the case of Depression-­era Nigeria, the government there (after years of depicting Nigerian society as hopelessly “backward,” justifying its paternalist arguments for rule) turned in the early 1930s to reifying and valorizing existing Indigenous forms of economic self-­help (such as esusu rotating credit societies that distributed community-­pooled savings). The state mobilized anthropological studies to arm its argument that in fact there already was an adequate safety net for distressed communities, so there was no need for government spending on relief.

12     Introduction

There was still a need for European experts, though, to guide those existing forms of community cooperation toward constructive “ ‘economic and social improvement’ ” and to import new forms of cooperation.30 That was where Strickland and ICS models came in. Strickland was brought in to advise the government in late 1933. Nigeria’s then governor, Donald Cameron, was a self-­professed “student of Mr. Strickland’s writings” and made the austerity argument for cooperatives plain: “They could begin the next day in the field . . . without a penny of finance.” All they needed was to send some officers to India for training so they could bring back a perfect copy of Strickland’s rural-­administrative system of cooperative outreach and supervision.31 The pitch that cooperative development cost very little was always present in its discourse, but there were other important factors pushing cooperatives into wider British-­colonial-­state practices of development in Africa and Asia. Among these factors were the routine ways in which colonial development knowledge spread via copying influential models and how in British-­colonial administrative cultures there was a widely shared reverence for the ICS, and the Punjab ICS especially. The perception of the crisis of “traditional society” that spelled the central problem of colonial rule also traveled from India to administrative cultures in Africa and in the Colonial Office in London. “Culture change,” as interwar anthropologists now termed it, became part of the everyday vernacular of officials, their experts, and missionaries concerned with development. Anthropologists’ scientific approach to studying community in its changing state was harnessed for the social engineering projects of indirect rule. If community ties that were integral to African social systems were about to collapse, the culture change thesis went, new community structure needed to be found by British experts, along with new techniques to engineer at the level of community and culture and to graft-­in new structures. The exertion of colonial power embodied what Tania Murray Li, following Nikolas Rose, argues is the paradox “at the heart of government through community” wherein “community is assumed to be natural, yet it needs to be improved [by experts].” “Even when the object of desire—the authentic, natural community—is found to be intact,” Li writes, “experts on community argue that it is vulnerable to degeneration because it lacks the capacity to manage change.”32 A common thread drew the interwar culture change arguments back to the roots of indirect rule in post-­1857 India: a certainty in the official mind that if community development solutions could not be found, disintegrated African systems would spawn violent, revolutionary mobilizations against empire. Amid this crisis officials and experts saw the cooperative movement as a new and safe basis of community action arriving just in time to reconnect and regulate community. At the same time, missionary educationists found the cooperative society to be a useful space of instruction for what they were trying to enact with community development, especially in Africa. Community development—increasingly

Introduction    13

going by that name in the 1920s and 1930s—was invariably presented as a project of education, usually of adult education, and reinforced by rhetorics of training, guiding, supervising, and learning. This meant that community development discourse often flowed through existing channels concerned with theorizing colonial education. In British Africa “native education” had long been claimed as the domain of missionaries, though the story of the interwar years was collaboration between missions and government to solve the crisis of community brought about by culture change, together advancing a program of rural education that was “adapted” for African conditions and for an “African mind” that Europeans claimed learned differently and could only be reached through adapted pedagogies.33 At international, ecumenical conferences missionaries elaborated a community development mission that was a fusion of millenarianism and modernism. “The evangelization of the world in this generation”—as the Christian evangelical youth movement’s slogan went—required the tools of the social scientist and the social engineer focused on lifting up the material base of the mission field through community-­driven modernization. Cooperative economics seemed to many to be the perfect technique for organizing community uplift and for training fluencies in modern village economics. But missionaries saw more to cooperatives than economics. Cooperatives also worked on the soul, providing a new space of missionary influence in village life to inculcate moral lessons and to shape character and “leadership.” Missionary community developers sought new media and new pedagogical techniques. They featured cooperatives in their representations of rural modernization to African audiences and treated cooperatives as spaces of project-­based instruction. Christian missionaries aligned mostly with the state officials in their views about cooperatives, and they drew from similar social-­ scientific sources (anthropology, psychology, rural economics) to shape their understanding of African social and cultural change. They helped drive the panic about culture change and the search for community solutions. But in some ways they saw the instrumentality of cooperatives differently, responding to the necessities of world missions in a world in which European rule seemed precarious and uncertain in the long term. Cooperatives in Christian practice promised to make the newer church communities self-­sustaining at a time when the connection between metropole and colony was threatened by the rise of anti-­colonial nationalisms, internationalisms, and other movements against colonial rule. As missionaries and government officials in Africa searched for community solutions to development and social reconstruction, the terminology they settled on for their work to promote and control cooperatives was “native co-­operation.”34 A big part of the story I trace is concerned with systems building in that field: specifically how in Africa the ideas of colonial cooperative experts were manifested in laws; in systems of publicity, registration, and supervision; and in government and missionary systems of “native education.”35 In their efforts, British community

14     Introduction

developers were linked into international networks of development knowledge and planning. Studies of development have been dominated by the US role after World War II, concerned primarily with how the United States—through its social science, foundation money, and foreign policy—exerted its influence in Africa and Asia during the Cold War.36 Community development, too, has been seen as something spun mostly from American resources and expertise.37 As we will see, there were important contact points with the US development complex, particularly where British administrators and missionaries explored American theories about rural education and racially “adapted” pedagogies. British community developers and their American counterparts shared a positivist vision about progress and the necessity of community modernization for the Global South. American rural sociological theory and American financial support also had considerable influence. Philanthropies like the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Corporation fed money into development and sponsored experts and seminal community development projects in British Africa. However, British planners and missionaries did not simply follow American prescriptions about community development. In terms of how cooperatives fit, I argue that the much more significant influence came from India and from earlier experiments with administering a cooperative system and framing “rural reconstruction” as projects of rural education.38 And while even there American experts and missionaries had a voice—as did influential Indian experimenters with community developers like Rabindranath Tagore— more important to the trajectory of the cooperative movement as part of colonial development were the ICS experts who spent their careers reworking the principles and models of the cooperative movement to serve the agendas of British colonial rule. Following the guidance of the ICS, colonial planners hewed to strict rules about cooperative development that paradoxically claimed fidelity with the democratic spirit of the cooperative movement while at the same time insisting that rural people in Asia and Africa needed a modified cooperative movement, one that gave near-­dictatorial powers to a new agency of state: the Cooperative Department. At the helm was the European Registrar. Considered to be indispensable to the system, he had to have ultimate power over societies—even to disband them or replace their elected officers. Furthermore, the rules as translated to Africa insisted that the growth of “native cooperation” should never be allowed to outpace the construction of the legal and supervisory system designed to control it. A cooperative movement without control was considered dangerous to African society and to colonial order. The commitment to the rules of the system—which reflected the hierarchies that upheld the colonial order in the first place—meant that plans often could hover in a zone of interminable social-­scientific study about whether people in particular colonial places were “ready” for cooperatives or whether a colony’s administrative systems were equipped to handle a cooperative

Introduction    15

movement if one should begin to take off. In cases when it was determined that the administrative system was not mature, officials put up barriers to prevent cooperatives from being able to form legally. In short, the colonial state’s intervention at every level was paramount. And because of the central role of state agents in the system, one of the core advantages that British community developers saw in cooperatives in Africa and Asia was the possibility that they could become an important propaganda channel for planners to put in motion their grand vision of development, defined for a territory by the colonial state’s agricultural experts or others concerned with development planning—in other words, with organizing how a territory’s land and resources would be used for the purposes of empire and capitalism. That quality of development group formation (which was a signature of community development in its international, twentieth-­century discourse) and the efficacy of a cooperative department as the agency to conduct the groups was promoted by Strickland in his writings and in his tours.39 However, in Africa settlers and some officials voiced serious concern that by promoting cooperatives for Africans, British authorities were facilitating the organization of groups that could go in very different directions from those planned and use their organizations to advance a pro-­African politics. The development of the system was always shaped by the specific field of colonial power in a colony. In some places organized opposition confronted the very idea of Africans cooperating in farming or marketing, as in settler-­controlled Kenya or in Uganda under a cash crop marketing regime dominated by European and Indian buyers and processors. In post–World War II British Africa it also was impossible to disconnect the field of power involved in cooperative and community development from the politics of anti-­colonialism and the reaction of imperial emergency rule. •

•

•

The book is divided roughly in half by the Second World War. The first chapters stress the interwar evolution of plans within government and among missionaries concerning cooperative development. Chapter 1 tells the story of political technology transfer: how the ICS’s system of cooperative control went empire-­ wide and what transformations it underwent in being brought into the project of developing Africa. I track this by following Strickland on his rural-­sociological study and advice tours to Malaya, Palestine, and East and West Africa. During these tours he investigated land tenure systems, patterns of rural debt and credit, rules and structures of marketing, and political situations in the territories he ­visited. In his reports and other writings he elaborated a vision of the future, still colonial societies that he thought cooperatives could build, emphasizing the wide range of welfare needs cooperatives would meet. A picture of the political economy of cooperative rule emerges from Strickland’s writings. It was to be enacted through the creation of a new domain of cooperative law derived from the urtext

16     Introduction

of the 1904 Indian Cooperative Societies Act. The chapter takes a postcolonial reading of cooperative law, asking what kind of economic and political subject it sought to produce as it governed through community.40 Chapter 2 explores how and why missionary educationists became cooperative system planners and examines projects in Africa that sought to teach cooperation as part of mission-­ supervised rural education in the 1920s–1940s. The chapter traces the missionary search for ­methods and media of community development in two significant projects in British East and Central Africa. One was a missionary-­government teacher training system—the Jeanes school system—that tried to bring community development and cooperatives to mission-­led village education and social welfare work. The other project was a mobile instructional cinema “experiment” in Eastern and Central Africa that used cooperatives as a favorite subject. Records from these projects show not just missionaries’ plans and their vision for community development but also how they read African society through the lens of crisis and pursued their projects with the big unanswered questions of African politics always looming ahead: Would African political movements bring an end to empire, and could Christian missions survive the end of European empires? The post–World War II chapters emphasize the contests of decolonization around cooperative development—for the empire broadly, but especially for Africa—and the imperial politics in Britain that connected the cooperative movement and development in Britons’ experience of decolonization. Chapters 3 and 4 tell the story of Uganda’s anti-­colonial cooperative movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Tens of thousands of cotton and coffee farmers wanted to organize cooperatives in order to build organization and momentum behind a political movement to call for democratic reforms in government and to challenge what they decried as an anti-­African structure of marketing. I treat the farmers’ movement in great depth, not only because it shows how cooperative development could be taken on and subverted, but also because it throws into stark relief the properties of colonial power and the prejudices of its engineers that were latent in cooperative development and wired-­in from the beginning. Chapter 3 sets out the broad postwar context of the struggle, explains new turns in development planning, and explores the logistics of state power involved in Cold War calculations about cooperative development in the empire. After presenting a wide view of cooperative development in the postwar moment as anti-­colonial movements emerged throughout the empire, I narrow the focus on the workings of Uganda’s colonial system and how and why the cooperative movement of state planning (following Strickland’s formula) became contentious, especially in Ganda politics. Chapter 4 seeks a deeper understanding of rural anti-­colonial politics, tactics of movement building and contestation, and development imaginaries as the Ganda small farmers used their unlicensed cooperative union—the Uganda African

Introduction    17

Farmers Union—as a political vessel to challenge the colonial order, especially by organizing a boycott of the state-­enforced routes of marketing. The organization’s constituent farmer groups refused to register under Uganda’s cooperative law, and many farmers saw the law and the structure of supervision by Cooperative Department assistants as antagonists to their greater political cause. The farmers’ union was banned under emergency powers enacted in 1949 in reaction to large anti-­government protests and “disturbances.” The farmers continued to organize in secret and waged a propaganda war against the “official cooperative movement.” The imperial state reacted by coordinating on two fronts, Uganda and London, to undermine the farmers’ movement, which officials insisted was rooted in a communist conspiracy. The colonial archive captures officials in London and Entebbe as the awareness sank in that their prized development idea was being taken over by anti-­colonial politics. When read against the grain, the colonial archive also reveals insights into the politics and organizing activity of the farmers’ movement, which also stretched to London, where representatives of the farmers found allies among anti-­colonial activists, including within the cooperative movement. In recent years British social and cultural historians have charted how decolonization was not confined to the colonial periphery but was at the center of politics, culture, and social experience in postwar Britain.41 Chapter 5 looks at decolonization and development from the vantage point of the British cooperative movement.42 With Labour’s Colonial Office in 1945 pinning its colonial development program to community development via a British-­led cooperative movement, inside the British movement cooperators started working community development and “cooperation in the colonies” into the movement’s postwar self-­image, linking its connection to development with its older commitments to democracy (insisting that cooperatives had been key to the origins of modern democracy in Britain and must certainly be in the colonies as well) and with its supposed postwar commitments to anti-­racism and solidarity with Commonwealth migrants in Britain.43 However, these myths were unsettled by racism and popular imperialism among cooperators and institutionalized racism in the cooperative movement, including by the fact that the largest consumer cooperative in Britain—the London Cooperative Society—operated a “colour bar” in some sections of its business. I follow anti-­colonial activists as they organized within the consumer movement. They wanted to see the cooperative movement marshal consumer politics in service of decolonization, breaking the development project from its imperial moorings. A vexing and resilient problem was the commercial connection between the cooperative movement and apartheid South Africa. Apartheid survived for decades after the 1950s–1960s moment of successful colonial liberation movements throughout much of Africa, and it did so with the vital support of Britain. In order to defeat

18     Introduction

apartheid, Africans in South Africa pursued a strategy on multiple fronts involving armed insurrection, civil disobedience campaigns, and a strategy to turn public opinion abroad against the regime in order to force economic sanctions and a boycott. Activists in Britain joined the campaign. Many believed that the cooperative movement in Britain would be an especially valuable ally in the boycott campaign. I explore the efforts of the Anti-­Apartheid Movement and the Movement for Colonial Freedom to organize in the cooperative movement. Activists faced a tough battle and met with much disappointment in their efforts to convince cooperative societies and co-­op movement leaders to support the boycott in a meaningful and sustained way and thus exposed the fallacy of thinking of the British cooperative movement as a natural ally to a project of decolonization that linked independence, development, and racial equality.44 Ultimately the aim of this book is to interpret community development in the final decades of the British empire by looking at its most ubiquitous official enactment and one of the most enduring objects in the spectacle of mid-­twentieth-­ century community modernization: the cooperative society. I dwell on cooperatives as they appeared in various and competing late colonial development imaginaries: the reading of society behind plans, the hopes that were placed in the cooperative movement to enact particular imagined futures and to avert others, the vision of political community that the cooperative movement under colonial control was supposed to initiate, and how anti-­colonial movements sought to dismantle and replace that vision. What follows is the story of how British colonial planners, experts, and missionaries—informed by the latest social science and concerned about crises of colonial order brought about by social change—discovered the cooperative movement and tried to steer it toward their purposes. They studied how to publicize and control it. Officials framed a new domain of colonial law around it. Missionary educators brought cooperative economics into the heart of community development education. But soon, at critical points around the postwar empire the cooperative movement was ideologically up for grabs, occupied by dissident movements and repurposed to fulfill visions for a postcolonial future. At the same time, pressing from the colonial periphery inward to the metropole, the discourses of British-­led but community-­driven modernization that had turned the cooperative movement into an arch symbol ended up transforming how Britons saw the late colonial and postcolonial project of development and their own role in it.

1

Cooperative Rule

Claude Strickland tried to conjure the crisis facing Africa. Addressing a joint meeting of the Royal African Society and the Royal Arts Society in London in 1934, the veteran of the Indian Civil Service’s Cooperative Department in Punjab invited those in attendance to imagine the upheaval of modernization from the perspective of an “African native farmer.” This farmer was the latest to be gripped and transformed by a force of social change that had earlier captured whole populations in the march of progress. That upheaval was powered, Strickland explained, by “industrial changes” and “the revolution in thought and practice” that came with them. What had previously aggravated “the troubles of the European small farmer” and created most of the problems of “the Asiatic peasant” had now arrived in Africa to overturn once again. European influences were everywhere: in new markets and factory goods and in “the subtle reactions of Western education and Western example.” The African farmer, Strickland told the audience, now stood “puzzled and distressed, seeing his old landmarks swept away in a flood of new luxuries and new beliefs, clinging with one hand to the doorpost of his shaken village home, reaching out with the other towards the perilous delights into which he [was] tempted to plunge.” He needed some means of readjusting to an “altered world.” “There is a danger,” Strickland warned, “that the African village . . . may lose its community spirit and dissolve into a crowd of selfish individuals for whom tribal customs, traditions and authority have no longer a value, but who have not discovered for themselves the right agency for effecting a change, for transforming the village and the mind of the villager from within.”1 This part of his lecture was stirring but familiar stuff. Almost everyone in the room already would have assimilated that image of Africa suddenly jolted into 19

20     Cooperative Rule

an encounter with what they variously termed the “modern world,” the “world economy,” or “industrialization.” It was the starting point for many interwar British experts: African society was in flux, and it was up to experts to slow the change and to reconstruct society in ways that enlisted and strengthened community. The discourse was fed by the work of social anthropologists, who used fieldwork to try to capture African society in its changing state.2 Indirect rule in the interwar era had come to imply a kind of anthropologist’s touch, a heavily academic endeavor to find and apply mechanisms of social adjustment that could first stabilize and then gradually transform the old order. At the lecture, the audience heard Strickland detail just such a mechanism of adjustment, and his scheme was the new idea: a “system of cooperative effort” that could become the basis for reconstructing African economic and political life.3 He had earlier described it to a different London audience as “a means of permeating the whole sociology of the people [of Africa and Asia] . . . with a completely new set of ideas and reconstructing their life.”4 The system was to progress in stages. First there was the requisite phase of preliminary study. As traveling adviser to colonial governments, that was his own indispensable role in the historical drama of cooperative uplift. Study had to start somewhere, but it was never supposed to stop. The system was meant to be a permanent siphon of sociological data to hone cooperative development over time for special and changing Asian and African conditions. But after the groundwork of study was in place, there came the establishment of a cooperative law, the formation of a Cooperative Department, and the selection of a Registrar who would go to India to train and return to conduct the new copy of the system. Strickland liked to quote from the report of the Marquess Linlithgow’s Royal Commission on Agriculture in India: “The Registrar should be the foundation of the movement.”5 Only this powerful executive could ensure that controls functioned well to guide the movement and relate it to evolving economic needs. The cooperative law itself was also indispensable. Only by bringing the community organization under the law would the cooperators be able to enforce mutual control. The cooperative’s disciplinary power over its members was supposed to build character and unlock capacities for development, and it was only as good as the threat of state-­ enforced punishment behind it. For this reason Strickland wanted to see debtors’ prisons remain and sentences for delinquent debt made even more severe (he cautioned Zanzibar officials—“in the interest of co-­operators”—to never succumb to public protests to end the practice).6 Finally, before the movement could take off there needed to be evangelists for it. The apostles of the system—the Registrar and his circuit-­riding staff—would need to find and train the first generation of cooperators. They would need to be aided by the full range of modern media and instructional technique: demonstration plots (run by members of the first cooperative societies), village school lessons, even radio.

Cooperative Rule    21

In his writings Strickland claimed to not espouse the “extreme and sanguine” views of utopian cooperative “enthusiasts.”7 In fact, though, he was a utopian. His cooperative utopia may have been even more fantastic than others. Robert Owen had thought that cooperatives could redeem the troubled history of industrialization and usher in a more equitable future. Strickland saw not only that but redemption, as well, for the history of empire. The cooperative movement would be the gift of the colonizer. If empire building had helped to usher in the disruptive forces of social change, now cooperatives could reconstruct community and remake colonial subjects—subjects whose lives, he thought, were marred by fundamental flaws in individual and collective character that prevented progress and kept many in poverty. Strickland wanted to transform the British empire into a vast cooperative system that for him, looking at the colonial world, was just as much about what he called the “moral elements” of the system: the “training of character by self control and mutual control.” The moral focus was what defined the cooperative movement under government control in India.8 It was a system that Strickland knew better than anyone. He spent his career from 1905 to 1930, with only brief interruptions, in Punjab Province, a supremely technocratic corner of the British Raj. It was an imperial culture that saw government as capable of great works and that read those works through a prism of colonial order and imperial defense. Punjab was the most sought-­after appointment in the Indian Civil Service (ICS), and Strickland had landed there right out of Oxford.9 He spent the war years and then most of the 1920s working his way up in the province’s celebrated Cooperative Department, finishing in the top position of Registrar. The interwar era was a time when science and social science were brought fully into colonial structures and rationalities of rule in Africa and Asia, establishing a development footing for empire in an era of internationalism and armed with theories of trusteeship.10 In this drift toward science, colonial governments often worked from Indian examples, and Punjab Province stood out above others as a reference point for colonial governments.11 The Punjab ICS had been famous in officialdom empire-­wide since the turn of the century as practitioners of a techno­ science of rural development focused on irrigated farming, peasant proprietorship, and cooperative economics. They were experimenters with ideas that went by names like “village uplift” and “rural reconstruction.”12 Strickland was therefore no rare visionary to see cooperatives as a remedy for a host of rural problems and to see their promise as government-­guided social development. Everyone in colonial administration understood that cooperatives held a sacred place in the gospel of Punjab ICS’s great works, right next to (and often understood in connection with) the 1900 Land Alienation Act, which acted on what officials regarded as an urgent political crisis of rural indebtedness by barring the sale of land from primarily Muslim “agriculturalists” to primarily Hindu “nonagriculturalists.” What made Strickland unique was that he extended

22     Cooperative Rule

his vision of cooperative rural reconstruction to the wider horizon of the empire. It was exportable as a technical fix to the empire’s interwar social crises. In his conception, cooperation was political technology to stabilize peasantries and to form and discipline character, which in his travels in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa he mapped both racially and by communal differences. This chapter does three things. First, it explores the Punjab cooperative system and the political vision behind it. It then tracks and contextualizes Strickland’s travels as a Colonial Office expert as he promoted cooperatives to colonial governments, studied comparative social situations in the territories he visited, and advised governments on how to fit the cooperative system into different structures of colonial rule. The final section explores how the system promoted by Strickland encountered the agendas set by local colonial authorities and the local fields of politics that existed around land, debt, and agricultural commodities in East Africa. G OV E R N I N G C HA R AC T E R : P U N JA B’ S “SYS T E M O F C O O P E R AT I V E E F F O RT ”

The connection between the Punjab ideal and the cooperative system deployed in Africa and elsewhere in the 1930s–1960s links the development project that triumphed as the rationale for empire in the mid-­twentieth century to the modes of rule rooted in the British Raj. Strickland’s own roots in the culture of the Punjab ICS was significant. It made him see rural societies as disturbed and unstable because of historical change but with a backwardness that stemmed from inner deficiencies and undeveloped capacities. “Unstable characters” needed to be stabilized and improved by colonial systems. These ideas were holdovers from the Victorian era. Their paternalism was extreme, conceiving of the cooperative society as a kind of school for learning practical and moral lessons. Strickland traveled the empire evangelizing about colonial cooperation as a peaceful and gradual bridge toward modernized and imperially loyal peasantries. When he did he proudly pointed toward Punjab as an exemplar, as if on its face the Punjab system of rural development was succeeding in building the harmonious (yet hierarchical) imperial social order he believed in. Yet throughout his time in the Cooperative Department, colonial order and the colonial economy were constantly disrupted by radical and revolutionary politics, and increasingly so in the 1920s, when rural Punjab was as much on the front lines of anti-­colonial struggle as the cities were, with diverse political movements among peasants and agricultural workers.13 Gandhism was a rising force during Strickland’s tenure as Registrar and involved both a fundamental rejection of British authority and an envisioning of a postcolonial national development that would have its heart in village economics.

Cooperative Rule    23

The cooperative movement as colonial technopolitics began in India as part of a search for solutions to a crisis of rural indebtedness that threatened colonial order and imperial defense. The rural debt crisis obsessed British officials in the ICS during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, especially in western India. Debt was disruptive. In the rural sociology refined within the ICS, debt and the threat of land alienation could produce rebellion. Earlier theories of political economy had initially allowed the British to see the transfer of land in progressive terms, and indebtedness became much more of a problem with British rule, something British officials in Provincial Revenue administrations understood quite well. Debt was believed to have been one of the contributing causes for the Rebellion of 1857, and officials recognized at the time that there was great popular disapproval of the rampant transfer of land titles to moneylenders through British courts. During the rebellion some former proprietors seized control of plots they had lost to repay debts.14 The “Deccan Riots” of 1875 in Bombay Presidency forced a further reckoning and precipitated an early effort by a British provincial government to use cooperatives to alleviate rural debt.15 Punjab Province held great strategic importance for the Raj as a military recruitment zone and base of operation for the Indian Army.16 This put high stakes on the success of a variety of development schemes, which together aimed to create a stable and prosperous peasantry, intensively cultivating high-­yield cash crops. Starting in the 1880s, over decades the British constructed a canal system that turned millions of acres of formerly nonarable land in the south of the province into a vast patchwork of irrigated farms and in the process relocated hundreds of thousands of colonists away from the “congested districts” of the central and eastern areas, which were thought to pose a subversive threat. The government operated botanical research stations to develop superior plants to be encouraged as cash crops and contrived systems of agricultural demonstration and advice to bring the newest techniques into wide practice. But there was a crisis facing the mostly Muslim “agriculturists” on whom the system relied.17 They were mired in debt and on the brink of dispossession. At the end of the nineteenth century, inside the Punjab ICS the practice of indirect rule meant rallying administrative power to the defense of the primarily Muslim “agriculturists.” The 1900 Land Alienation Act placed restrictions on the mortgaging and sale of land from “agriculturist tribes” to members of “nonagriculturist tribes.”18 This all but banned the activity of Hindu middle-­class moneylenders in the province. It cut off Hindu trading castes from access to land and the status attached to it and exacerbated the growing anti-­British sentiment among the province’s Hindu population, who already felt the government was discriminating against them in favor of Muslims in its hiring practices.19 The act would later also be used against kamins, who were low caste agricultural laborers, by designating them nonagriculturists. This legislation barred three million of the

24     Cooperative Rule

poorest people in rural Punjab from ever owning land. Among the rural protest movements of the 1920s were those that involved kamins agitating for a change to their classification.20 Addressing rural debt by restricting moneylending presented a new problem. As Punjab cooperatives experts were quick to point out, credit and debt relationships were a social necessity, and the practical constraints of cash-­crop agriculture meant that farmers often had to borrow in order to plant. The British believed the 1900 Land Alienation Act spared agriculturists from landlessness, but they were now left without credit. Officials became convinced that in order for a progressive peasantry to develop, the state needed to “find Raffeissen”—that is, the formula of cooperative credit societies and unions (the federated societies in an area) famously pioneered by Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century.21 If we take them as a whole, the writings of Punjab Registrars in the first quarter of the twentieth century—from their annual reports and commentaries on cooperative law to the “rural rides”–style social investigations of Malcolm Darling—an image of their ideal progressive peasant is clear. Cooperatives, they all believed, could forge an ideal peasant subject. He (for the peasant, in their conception, is a man; he has a family) would be self-­interested and self-­disciplined yet community minded; ashamed of large or delinquent debt but perpetually investing and borrowing capital, servicing small debts that pay large dividends in agricultural improvement and community uplift; and dependent on government for agricultural advice and loyal to it but not reliant on the government to provide financial support. Colonial power under the Raj flowed through systems and the “paperwork technologies of the state.”22 Punjab officials, in particular, fetishized the role of British administration as the indispensable agent of progress. As Strickland saw it, the secret to the cooperative movement’s success anywhere with “backward” people was the competence and character of its powerful executive, the Registrar of Cooperative Societies, and the efficiency of rural public information, cooperative registration, supervision, and audit that he oversaw. Where these controls did not exist, they needed to be created quickly before a cooperative movement started outside the state’s control. Not only did the state need to guide and control the growth of the cooperative movement, but Strickland wanted officials in the colonies he visited and advised to appreciate how a properly configured Cooperative Department could give additional capacities to the state in rural life: new ways of gaining useful economic and sociological knowledge and speaking to the governed. He advised officials in the Federated Malay States that “if full benefit is to be derived from co-­operation, the Co-­operative Department must study the problems of Malaya as a whole, keeping in close touch with the land policy of Government, the development of new industries, great or small, and the principles which underlie the educational system.”23 He told the government of Palestine that “the

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modern Registrar must be fully abreast of activities of all departments working for the improvement of rural conditions,” and he promised that “the experts of other departments will find, in a wide-­spread and efficient cooperative movement, the one agency enabling them to reach the mass of the rural population.”24 In the conception of the Punjab Registrars, the job of the Cooperative Department, from the Registrar down to its rural inspector-­assistants, was more than spreading cooperative principles. It was about initiating new village-­level groups to carry out the development designs of a host of government experts. The new groups would be open to the supervision and advice of the colonial state’s experts. They constituted a propaganda channel. The Agricultural Department might run demonstration farms using the newest seeds, techniques, and machinery, but it was the inspectors of the Cooperative Department who interfaced with the farmer groups that were to apply those techniques on a community basis. There was a belief within the Cooperative Department, based on reports from its rural inspectorate, that “where cultivators adopt the advice of Agricultural Assistants, it will be found that these are usually members of [cooperative] societies.”25 In his travels Strickland pressed this feature on colonial governments. Cooperation could turn a group of villagers into a development-­minded vanguard, and it could train them in how to discuss their community development needs and make choices and plans. He explained for the benefit of officials in Malaya that “when a group of villagers have once been brought together and trained to discuss their own needs in the atmosphere of a credit society, they can be induced gradually to undertake the selection of their seed, and the improvement of their poultry, goats, and cattle.”26 He extended the idea to Africa. “The essential point,” he wrote, “is the organization of voluntary groups, which must thereafter be continually re-­taught and re-­inspired until the character of their members is firm enough to dispense with extraneous support.”27 A cooperative group, Strickland argued, could only grow to encompass a whole community “if it trains and reforms the weaker individuals (giving them an opportunity to improve themselves).” Cooperators needed to build on “sound foundations . . . not on an oral promise or a written agreement, however binding at law, but on the character and capacity of the members.”28 Character was a product of discipline, and because of their shared stakes in the society, members would police the conduct of their fellow members. Strickland’s identification of character as a measurable and trainable quality that was key to unlocking social development echoed earlier moral discourses of liberal governmentality.29 Character was an especially meaningful concept for Victorian Britons and Anglo-­Indians.30 For many it had helped to explain social stratification: good character made wealth, bad character made poverty. In the empire and the metropole, judgments about collective character were mapped onto race and helped to demarcate the boundary between citizen and subject. John Stuart Mill argued for the development of a “science of character” that could

26     Cooperative Rule

understand—and potentially influence—“the formation of national or collective character as well as individual.”31 In the empire government agents, missionaries, and European settlers read colonial society through taxonomies of character that relied on a proliferation of stereotypes. It followed, then, that Punjab’s cooperative system should come pre-­equipped with mechanisms aimed at the moral, inner life of peasants alongside the economic. But it must also be said that it was not unique that cooperatives enthusiasts should see a character-­building feature. Cooperators in Britain and Europe celebrated the moral improvement side of the movement. But the colonial situation transformed the meanings of moral reform in the spreading of the cooperative light. Character was then a judgment made across the lines of colonial dialectics, and the intimate work of gleaning insight into the inner life of cultivators served colonial purposes. The goal was to shape subjects to fit a colonial modernity defined by British rulers. The way cooperative developers thought they would achieve a moral conversion was by taking advantage of a coercive element inside cooperative societies. In the cooperative, the technics of risk would need to operate on the inner life and habits of individual members. It was common for Registrars to see themselves and their subordinate staff as hybrids of teacher and evangelist. Above all, participation in cooperatives would inscribe thrift in the character of Punjab peasants. The first Punjab Registrar, S. Wilberforce, wrote that his policy was to treat thrift, not credit, as “an end itself” and “the foundation for the necessary superstructure of credit.” Thrift was the key to developing “the co-­operative spirit.”32 Once a society was established, it started a disciplinary machinery of reconstruction in the village. Strickland argued that the “virtues of thrift, industry and harmony” inculcated in the routines of the cooperative had to “become habitual and . . . shared by a number of neighbors.”33 This habit-­forming discipline could be used to reinforce a much wider range of progressive moral effects than just the inculcation of thrift. Cooperatives, in theory, could be used to gradually weed out whatever the British deemed to be bad cultural practices. For instance, discourses about Indian extravagance and waste were rampant in the administrative cultures of the ICS. Extravagant weddings became the arch-­example of what they believed was Indians’ propensity to waste money, which pointed to the need for thrift and the corrective features of cooperation when it came to such moral failings. Cooperative officials believed that as people not yet enrolled in cooperatives came to see the material advantages of cooperative membership in access to credit and material improvement, they would reform their own economic and moral practices in order to be worthy. The bylaws of a society were the key to this. They would have to be accepted by any would-­be member and could be used to prohibit any number of undesirable activities that might corrode the character (and credit) of the group. Cooperative Department officials highlighted examples in their reports as proofs of concept. Dhunds in Murree tehsil started a cooperative with bylaws

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designed to discourage litigation and “extravagance.” One society passed a specific bylaw that fined members who hired “dancing girls” at weddings. A man in Lahore was fined by his cooperative for using gilt letters on wedding invitations. There were bylaws to discourage members from distilling spirits. One village society was not allowed to be started until all members signed a written contract that they would not gamble. The Registrar reported that “the distinction [between members and non-­members in the village] smote the non-­members who within a few months gave up gambling and applied for membership.” Another society used its bylaws to curb one member’s frequent trips to the mosque for prayer—his credit was cut to 30 rupees until “he took the hint” and “bestirred himself over his fields.” In another case, a society expelled a man on a charge of “seduction” (which may have meant adultery). The Registrar approved of this subtle and bureaucratic form of vigilante justice, wryly noting that “the Court acquitted him, the society did not.”34 This was a joke, but in fact Punjab Registrars were excited about how one form of cooperative—the arbitration society—could settle civil disputes and ease the burden on courts in what the British believed was a hyperlitigious society. Strickland extolled these types of societies to colonial officials he advised in Africa. Cooperative group formation was explicitly formulated to work with capitalism, not to provide an alternative to it. In addition to forging a new relation between idealized modernizing peasants and the colonial state, cooperatives were supposed to turn colonial rural societies toward a steady relation, ultimately, with capital. The kinds of cooperatives Punjab was most known for—the Raifeissen rural credit society—would provide risk pools that would be safer bets for commercial banks, bringing capital to agricultural development. Registrars theorized cooperation as a mechanism to not only improve individual character but also make collective community character calculable for government and capital. As the first Registrar, S. Wilberforce, summed up his thinking on the problem in relation to credit societies: “My object has always been to prove to the money market that well-­managed village Cooperative Societies are sound business institutions and have a right to demand credit at reasonable rates of interest.”35 The government’s role was to frame the technical-­legal terms to ensure the smooth interaction between banks and cooperative risk pools of potential debtors by establishing the cooperative law and fielding a rural inspectorate to be in frequent contact with cooperative groups. In the evolving bureaucracy of registration, inspection, and control, the limits on how much a society could borrow from cooperative central banks and commercial banks were directly set by the Provincial Deputy Registrar or the Assistant Registrar after a review of cooperators’ assets.36 The work of assessing and building up societies’ solvency became a large part of the day-­to-­ day work of the provincial cooperative inspectors. They performed ground-­level inspections of members’ holdings and from them generated actuarial calculations of the health of the society at large. The detail in a society’s bookkeeping, the

28     Cooperative Rule

proven enforcement of its bylaws, and its ability to collect from its members and enforce exclusive dealing would all be part of the data that would enable the measurement of risk and the separation of the creditworthy from the unworthy (and then bank decisions about whether to lend or not and at what rates of interest). Cooperative Registrars in India and elsewhere saw the social utility of the cooperative movement in terms of a liberal vision of the proper relationship between the individual, the state, and social welfare. Self-­help and self-­reliance were moral qualities that held the key to development, and they could be stymied by welfare provision from the state. Strickland was adamant that rural development was weakened by direct assistance. “There is a risk,” he wrote in making his case for cooperatives in Africa, “that State assistance—land and loans at reduced rates, advances for tools, the free grant of ploughs, packing sheds, or grading plant” would, like charity, tend “to weaken the spirit of self-­reliance and industry.” If the state tried to do too much it would be costly, and the personnel needed to carry out state-­sponsored uplift would be prone to corruption. It was foolhardy for officials to “enter into direct relations with a multitude of single persons whose conduct they cannot possibly supervise.” Cooperatives, on the other hand, were “free from these defects” and could facilitate, fund, and supervise rural uplift more efficiently and effectively. His argument was not entirely laissez-­faire; he always insisted that a new department of state with trained personnel needed to be established and active in order to pull off the sort of community development that he hoped for. But intervention should be in the form of educating communities in cooperative economics and gradually building up the character of subjects, not direct financial assistance.37 Strickland believed that one of the problems with state-­sponsored land banks (where money is lent at low interest from state coffers rather than “leaving people painfully to save or collect money for themselves”) was that the peasant “feels no moral obligation to assist a State institution by repaying its loans.”38 In the cooperative, members are bound by existing community ties and have an ability to exert social pressures that the state does not have. The whole question of where the state fit with cooperation of course needs to be viewed in the context of ideological movements that were critical of capitalism and saw the state as an organizing entity for socialism. Punjab Registrars were clear: cooperation solved problems in “ ‘undiluted capitalism,’ ” but it was not to be confused with socialism or communism. As the Indian system was taken up by other colonial governments, its ideological profile in that regard traveled with it. As one cooperative official in the Malayan Civil Service put it in the early 1930s: “Co-­operation will have nothing to do with the theory that all men are equal and that all must share alike. . . . It stands for the freedom of the individual to produce as much as his energy and ability permit him” without denying “the right of capital to a fair share of the profits.”39 The implicit presence of Soviet modernization in the cooperative official’s field of vision is striking. It betrays an underlying anxiety

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about the precarity of British power and the growing appeal of ideologies antithetical to it, and so the official has to swat it away. British capitalists—who might worry about losing control of the plantation colony that over many decades had ballooned British fortunes, first through sugar and then through rubber—could rest easy.40 The cooperative movement was there to rescue colonial capitalism, not replace it. The cooperative system in Punjab struggled to live up to the administrative hype about it once one looked past the machinery of administration—which, to be sure, was built to perfection. Clive Dewey has argued that in many ways the Punjab cooperative system was a failure on its own terms and perceived as such all along at points lower down on the British administrative hierarchy: by village officials and by officials at the middle tehsil level of British administration. Sometimes disillusionment could even infect the Cooperative Department. Cooperatives in Punjab, in Dewey’s evaluation, were “fatally handicapped” by their promoters’ “ethical enthusiasms,” which made them look first for moral uplift and led them to treat societies as “schools of economic virtue, public service and social solidarity.” At the same time, they were undercut by the fact that many indebted peasants continued to prefer to obtain credit from the bania, most of whom were village shopkeepers; they were familiar to the borrower and often flexible with the schedule of repayment for their clients. In Gurgaon District under the administration of Frank Lugard Brayne, an influential practitioner of village uplift and rural reconstruction (and nephew of Lord Lugard), cooperatives were formed at “breakneck speed” in the 1920s and 1930s, only to have a majority of them fold within a few years. In 1943 cultivators there procured less than 5 percent of their credit from cooperatives, which meant they had clearly not succeeded in “their most limited practical objective, displacing the moneylender as the principal source of credit.”41 P O L I T IC A L T E C H N O L O G Y T R A N SF E R

There were, however, many people in imperial circles outside of Punjab who mistook its “system of cooperative effort” for the perfect model of community-­ centered rural modernization. The Punjab experiment with cooperation was more important than all others in terms of its imprint on wider, pan-­imperial theorization about cooperatives as the key to rural reconstruction. The experiences of Punjab experts formed some of the main background of shared imperial knowledge about cooperation and rural development. The annual reports of the Punjab Cooperative Department and books written by Strickland and others from the experience of cooperative development in the province formed a substantial part of the reading material utilized in training cooperative department staff in other colonies, and the higher officers in cooperative departments went to Punjab for training. Most important of all, though, was Strickland’s personal role as the

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Colonial Office’s traveling expert on cooperation to colonial governments in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Strickland retired from the ICS in 1930, but his last years were spent mostly on special assignments promoting the ICS’s model of cooperative development to other colonial governments in the empire. He started with Malaya, which gathered buzz enough to prompt Sidney Webb’s Colonial Office to send him to Palestine, and then after his retirement he went on further trips to Zanzibar and Tanganyika. He also started on a tour of West Africa that was funded by the Carnegie Foundation and facilitated by the Colonial Office, but his trip was cut short when he came down with dysentery (he went to Nigeria and the British Cameroons, but he had to cancel his visit to Sierra Leone). As he traveled recurring problems preoccupied him: inadequate statistics and economic data almost everywhere he went; indebtedness and the consequent threat posed to his idealized class of would-­be progressive peasants; and character as the determining factor in the economic position and prospects of individuals and groups. While his advice was tailored to some extent for each territory he visited, there was a definite boilerplate behind many of his recommendations, which in every case were to make other colonial systems more like Punjab’s: focus on character development, refine the systems of rural data collection and the state’s propaganda channels with rural populations (via Cooperative Departments), and train a staff of cooperative extension agents who would privilege sound cooperative principles over the speed of the movement’s growth. Speed of a cooperative movement’s growth was never the important thing for Strickland. Instead he cared about getting the system configured properly and building capacity for the state’s supervision of the movement, and often he advised colonial governments (as in Malaya) to slow down registrations in order to retool bureaucracy and train its personnel so that the “the real work, the development and reconstruction of the country” could commence.42 Strickland visited Malaya at the end of 1928, just as the effects of the global slump in agricultural commodity prices were about to hit with full force. The first decades of the twentieth century had seen the plantation colony turn decisively to rubber production, quickly becoming the world’s top producer of the product and the most profitable colony in the British empire. Thousands of immigrant Chinese, Javanese, and Tamil workers arrived each year to work in various sections of the burgeoning industry. Tamils, especially, were recruited to the large European-­owned plantations, where they were treated harshly by plantation managers, enduring “factory-­like work routines” that steadily sped up the work of planting, tapping, and collecting latex while their wages rose and fell with the fluctuating world prices for rubber (wages fell sharply during the Great Depression).43 Meanwhile, Malay and Chinese smallholders planted rubber trees on their plots, and soon nearly half of the colony’s rubber output was coming from small cultivators, who often searched for loans and then tried to fend off default and

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foreclosure when rubber prices slumped and they could no longer afford to manage their high-­interest debt.44 Strickland was not brought in to start a cooperative system in Malaya but rather to advise on how to improve an existing one. The colonial government there began promulgating ICS-­modeled cooperative laws for its various jurisdictions starting in 1922; it already had a director of cooperation (essentially the Registrar role), and it already had a Cooperative Department whose agents were promoting and registering societies. The officials and staff tasked with cooperative work focused on three types of cooperatives: credit societies for rural small­ holders (with hopes of eventually starting latex marketing societies), savings and loan societies for urban dwellers, and thrift societies for migrant workers on rubber plantations (essentially savings societies but generally without a lending function). Strickland assessed the progress of the movement with each type and made recommendations about where the colonial government should focus its planning and resources. Of the rural credit societies that some smallholders with rubber trees were starting, Strickland had trouble understanding why smallholder credit was necessary at all given the permanence of rubber and coconut trees, which he thought should mean that the grower had no seasonal need for credit (unlike the European or Indian cash-­crop cultivator or the rice grower in Malaya, who had to worry about planting seed and procuring other inputs every year). What the rubber-­producing smallholder needed was that character quality of thrift, not credit. Strickland decided that it must be pure lack of thrift, a tendency toward extravagant and wasteful spending, and a lack of ability to think and reason economically that sent rubber growers into debt. He concluded from his short visit that “[if] money comes to a Malay’s hands he spends it, regardless of the time when he will need it urgently” and that his “attitude in economic adversity is a good-­tempered but apathetic acquiescence.” The Malayan Civil Service had not made incredible strides in registering rural credit societies anyway, and Strickland advised that the government cease almost entirely new registrations of rural credit societies, except in rice-­growing areas like Kedah and Perlis.45 Regarding the second type, the urban “thrift and loan” society, Strickland was struck by how quickly these co-­ops had popped up in the towns. In just a few years since the cooperative laws had been announced in the Federated Malay States and the Straits Settlements and registrations had commenced, fifty societies had formed with a total of just under twenty thousand members. Strickland figured, though, that the initial rush to join by “the salary-­earning classes . . . [burdened by] debt to money-­lenders of diverse communities” was now over. He urged caution. He warned that many of the initial members were wrongly “thinking rather of loans than of thrift,” and societies were not inspecting closely enough whether applicants for loans were sufficiently creditworthy. Rather than working to expand the savings and loan societies, the Cooperative Department, he argued,

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should work on promoting housing cooperatives and “better living societies” of the type that Punjab Registrars extolled for their ability to get whole communities to reform what were deemed by British authorities to be “extravagant” practices, especially the staging of expensive wedding celebrations.46 Again and always with Strickland, he focused on the character-­forming machinery of cooperation and how members’ shared stakes in a society would mean that they would police each other and compel action, in aggregate transforming group behavior to fit the British ideal of a modern community. Interestingly, Strickland saw special importance in “both political and economic grounds” for the third type of cooperative—the estate laborers’ thrift society—for reasons that underscore the ideological positioning of the official cooperative movement of state planning in relation to colonial capitalism. He was excited about savings societies and suggested that the cooperative movement’s character-­shaping machinery, teaching thrift, could be a boon for capitalist plantation owners by indirectly helping them to rescue the reputation of their estates, which were widely viewed as having harsh and exploitative work conditions. The gist of his argument was that the spread of savings societies would in time make it easier for capitalist planters to recruit ­workers to their estates. “A labourer who saves his money,” Strickland proclaimed, “is the best possible advertiser in India of the conditions under which he served, and though he may return home earlier than he would otherwise have done, he is also likely to come again to Malaya, bringing his relatives with him.”47 And yet those gains and other “great benefits” seemed to Strickland a long way off, since before a cooperative movement could move forward, “strengthening the character of the Malays and all other communities,” the state’s system of supervising the movement needed major repair.48 Strickland analyzed the department’s deficiencies against his Punjab model and made recommendations about how to invigorate it. He declared that the cooperative movement in the territory was stunted largely because of administrative failures having to do with a poorly trained, inefficient, and demoralized Cooperative Department staff. The morale problem stemmed from boredom: the staff had little to inspire them, as they had so far failed to glimpse his utopia about progressive peasants in reconstructed societies launching development on a grand scale. The department’s personnel needed to be energized. He recommended that select officers be sent to India, “where they can see what Co-­operation has achieved in the hands of Orientals and above all of Muhammadans,” and where they might take a four-­month course in Punjab on cooperation and economics.49 The other problem Strickland diagnosed was with rural economic data, and what becomes immediately clear is just how important it was to him to establish cooperation as part of a much greater project of colonial knowledge and development planning. The Malayan Cooperative Department, he argued, was out of touch with the needs of the people because it had an inferior statistical base for understanding rural society. He recommended

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that major economic studies be conducted and that a system for permanently sustaining research be put in place.50 The colonial government in Malaya immediately started putting Strickland’s recommendations into motion. A member of the Malayan Civil Service was assigned to a new role as economic and education officer in the Cooperative Department and was sent on a study tour of cooperatives in India and Europe; additional officers were sent for training as well. Right away a committee was formed to investigate rural indebtedness. There were other new hires, including a librarian to keep the department in touch with the latest economic scholarship.51 The system was starting to look more like the recursive loop of development knowledge that Strickland believed was needed to study economic realities and disseminate new technical strategies of outreach and uplift to solve them. The Cooperative Department even started to produce its own promotional films (the first was the scolding, moralizing Thrift and Extravagance in 1929) and circulated them via a rural lecture caravan that the department shared with the Rubber Research Institute and the Agricultural Department.52 Strickland recommended the founding of an Economic Board, which he intended as a hub of development research and planning. This was deferred for a short time. However, officials within the department continued to push the idea, adapting the concept and decentralizing it somewhat to focus on district-­level study and planning. In 1932 their proposal for District Economic Boards was adopted by the government, and by 1933 boards had been started in at least seven districts, with others forming. The boards were chaired by district officers and structured so that the Agricultural Department and Cooperative Societies Department had reserved permanent seats. This places cooperative rule front and center in the history of development planning in Malaya. The boards were each eventually supposed to come up with long-­term development plans, though the immediate priority was to deal with “the situation arisen as a result of the world slump and the catastrophic fall in the prices of primary products.”53 At the same time, inside the Cooperative Societies Department there was a sense of urgency that tied cooperation and the work of the District Economic Boards (and development broadly speaking) to the continued stability of colonial rule. It was clear that problems were deeper and not just attributable to the recent shocks to the world economy. Anti-­colonial politics also traveled through the circuits of the Bay of Bengal, and in Malaya political texts and “ ‘subversive’ newspapers” circulated; images of Gandhi and other Indian nationalists proliferated through Tamil Muslim vendors in Malaya.54 Cooperative Department officials looked on anxiously, especially at the rise of Gandhism. They saw a similar reckoning ahead for the British in Malaya in the form of insurgent mass movements. As one official put it, Gandhi was going beyond the typical nationalist call and instead challenging “the whole basis of British rule in India in particular and British colonial policy in general” on the grounds that the British had neglected “the economic welfare of the subject races for whose

34     Cooperative Rule

future we have assumed responsibility.” “Sooner or later,” the official warned, the Malayan government would face “the same fierce light of criticism as British rule in India,” and already one could sense among “the younger generation of educated Malays . . . the beginnings of a feeling that all is not well and that the future is disquieting.”55 Political crisis was always in sight for British community developers as they shaped their plans for cooperatives. The prevailing mood of crisis was even more palpable and immediate in Palestine, where Strickland was sent next. There the British were preoccupied with how to engineer plans for economic and political development that would square their commitment to the Zionist project of a national home for Jewish settlers with Britain’s League of Nations trusteeship duty to look out for what the British discerned were the interests of the territory’s Arab population. British officials tended to analogize the situation in Palestine with settler colonies in Africa, equating Arabs with Africans and Jews with white settlers (such as in South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, or Kenya). Accordingly, the British saw their trustee role in terms of ameliorating stress on Arab cultivators, while at the same time the British saw Jews as ideal developers who would be civilizing agents and gradually lift up material conditions for Arabs.56 Two projects consumed interwar British technocrats as they approached ethnoreligious conflict between Arabs and Jews. On one front, the British plotted how to partition the territory (plans that they never enacted); in so doing they were motivated especially by a desire to maintain their own imperial control and geostrategic position in the region.57 In planning partition, the British drew on models that had been tried in other places in the empire to solve political crises and stabilize British power. In 1920 the British had successfully partitioned Ireland, and in 1905–1911 they had temporarily (and thus unsuccessfully) partitioned Bengal in a strategy to divide the Bengali-­speaking population and thereby disrupt the momentum behind the Congress Party and what the British feared would become an all-­India nationalist movement.58 The other preoccupation for the British in Palestine, similarly conceived as a means of maintaining control, was how to treat the perceived sources of discontent that led Arabs to revolt, and for that the administrative instinct was to look to the sociological problem of rural debt and landlessness. In August 1929, less than a year before Strickland’s tour of Palestine, a weeklong Arab uprising (often called the “Wailing Wall riots” in English sources and the “Buraq revolt” in Arabic sources) involved violent attacks on Jewish colonies. In the attacks 133  Jews were killed and more than 300 injured, while in counterattacks and under British repression, 116 Palestinians were killed and more than 200 injured. The uprising jolted British authorities to see the political problem of Arab landlessness.59 A succession of official inquiries into the 1929 uprising revealed an unsettling social reality. Crushing debt, increased taxes to support British government, and falling prices for agricultural commodities forced increasing numbers of Arab cultivators (fellahin) to sell

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their land. Officials now warned of a growing “landless and discontented class” that posed a threat to the colonial order.60 The next several years saw an intense policy debate about how to rescue the fellahin from debt and dispossession. British authorities looked to the example of Punjab for a model. Strickland was sent to Palestine as part of what was effectively the Colonial Office’s response team of experts, tasked with deciphering the causes of the unrest and the feasible mechanisms for solving it through development. His study trip occurred before Sidney Webb’s October 1930 White Paper on Palestine, which attempted to slow Jewish immigration and the purchase of Arab land (and was subsequently rescinded by Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald). Strickland was in the camp of social investigators such as Sir Walter Shaw and Sir John Hope Simpson (as well as officials like Webb and John Chancellor, Britain’s high commissioner for Palestine), who thought that whatever the immediate cause having to do with a dispute about the Wailing Wall, the deeper causes of the 1929 uprising were land, debt, and dispossession.61 Strickland was sharply critical of the Mandate government for not having seen earlier the analogous situation between peasants in Palestine and peasants in India and for not appreciating the value of the ICS’s rural expertise. The government was permitting Jewish immigration and maintaining order but “extemporizing remedies for any evils which the inevitable friction of Jews and Arab might create.” “Such an empirical treatment,” he wrote “might be pardonable to a non-­colonizing country, but not to a people and government which enjoy the widest experience of Oriental rule and communal antipathies.” If after the war and the dissolution of the Ottoman system British authorities had followed India’s lead from the start and seriously tried to organize a credit cooperative movement, “the peasant who now scratches a living out of thirty acres of barley and millet might have been managing an orange grove or orchard with a total holding of ten acres, and have owed a productive debt at a moderate rate of interest, while his surplus land would have been available for colonists.”62 The fellahin, Strickland argued, did not have the “economic tools to meet Jewish competition, and will go under unless they make a desperate effort to change the terms of the struggle. Their effort in 1929 took a wrong form, but was directed to the right end—the winning of public attention to the land question.”63 In Strickland’s mind, the important economic tool that Jews had, but Arabs did not, was cooperative credit.64 British officials wondered why the cooperative movement was not taking off in a similar way among Arab peasants. Officials fell back on their reading of character and mentality. Chancellor was convinced that “the principal difficulty in encouraging the system amongst the Arabs lies in the inherent suspiciousness of the Arab character.” He thought like a Punjab Registrar. Cooperatives, he argued, would be “of great value to the Arabs if they could be induced to use them” through several years of steady propaganda and organizing work by a trained cooperatives officer.65

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British authorities got behind some of Strickland’s proposals and left others. One that Chancellor rejected, for instance, was Strickland’s call for the government to found a radio station to broadcast news (in a “true form” as opposed to the present “distorted form”) and “amusing matter, music and other entertainment” to Arab villages. He wanted the government to also promote village ownership of radio sets for group listening in a community hall. This followed Strickland’s conviction that “the great lack of rural life throughout the world is the lack of novelty and variety in interests.”66 Though that idea was rejected, the Mandate government did start to promote and register cooperative societies. It already had a Cooperative Law to be used for registering groups. Strickland had recommended a full-­time Registrar, though the government had difficulty finding an officer who could at once speak Arabic and also be expert in cooperation; a temporary Registrar was found after some months.67 The government went on to promote, form, and register societies in Arab villages and with some initial success. This was essentially the scheme that the first Punjab Registrar, Wilberforce, had started in 1904: join groups into societies so that their collective credit would make them appealing to the money markets. Barclays Bank in Palestine agreed to provide loans to the new societies, which in turn provided loans to their members for slightly higher rates of interest. Propaganda started in the villages in 1933, when 14 societies were registered. More joined up over the next several years, until in 1936 the total number of registered Arab societies plateaued at 121 when a major Arab uprising, the Arab Revolt (1936–1939), began. The braking effect on new registrations was largely due to the fact that the value of fellahin holdings decreased dramatically as “much of their fixed capital was seized or destroyed by bands of Arabs or by the British collective punishments in villages.” Barclays briefly stopped giving loans to the societies altogether in the early 1940s and only started again when the government agreed to guarantee a portion of the loans in the event of default. The numbers of societies declined and would continue to do so until after World War II.68 Strickland took a template everywhere he went for how to understand social change and effect social reconstruction. Some of the specific content changed, but the fundamentals did not: cooperatives had to be local groups, slowly growing under supervision; land banks were generally bad because they did not construct character-­improving community development groups, and they created dependency on the state; cooperative departments needed to be knowledge producers about a range of subjects, preeminently about peasant sociology and economy; and it was better not to have a cooperative movement among colonial people at all than to have one without the supervisory system that pivoted around the Registrar. That was the Punjab system. It all responded to the same general set of crises joining economic and moral dimensions of agriculturists’ lives in the empire. On one level Strickland saw population pressures, indebtedness and dispossession,

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peasants as a class in falling circumstances, and so forth. But the problem had sources in the character of individuals and communities. He argued that failure to slow down Jewish immigration may have exacerbated the landlessness problem, but it also stemmed from “instability of character.” People in this condition were politically volatile and dangerous. “Until the Arab has been placed in a position to help himself,” he wrote shortly after the 1929 uprising, “he will, undoubtedly, being an Oriental, an individual of strong passions and only a few years removed from ‘gun rule,’ continue to indulge in murder and riot.” He needed cooperation, and then “once he is free from crushing debt, he becomes anxious to learn, and will then be a more peaceful neighbor and a more useful collaborator with the Jew in cultivating the soil of Palestine.”69 D EV E L O P I N G A F R IC A

After Strickland’s visit to Palestine, Sidney Webb recruited him for a further study and advice tour—this time to East Africa to counsel the governments of Zanzibar and Tanganyika on how to use cooperatives to repair growing cracks in the British foundation of indirect rule. It was by sponsoring and overseeing trips like these that the Colonial Office really learned his system and its rules and began to appreciate how cooperatives could become a packaged solution to ease the stresses of rural social change in Africa. The situations of rule and crisis were different in the two territories. Strickland first visited Tanganyika and then Zanzibar, but they were part of the same trip, and because there was more commonality in the structure of indirect rule in Tanganyika and Uganda (where we go next after this chapter), here I take Strickland’s stops out of order and handle Zanzibar first and conclude the chapter with discussion of Tanganyika (touching as well on Kenya). Well before Strickland’s tours of Africa in the early 1930s, concepts of economic cooperation were part of competing visions of development there, which is important to keep in mind when I discuss the defeat of cooperative rule in Uganda and the anti-­colonial usage of cooperatives after empire. Cooperatives figured prominently in Black Atlantic thought of the early twentieth century. In the ideas and plans of Marcus Garvey, as well as Winifred Tete-­Ansa from Gold Coast (Ghana), cooperatives were part of a Pan-­Africanist business network in the making in the 1920s. In a form suited for and shaped by politics of Pan-­African solidarity, they wanted cooperatives to connect African farmers to an African bank and an African-­American buying firm and thereby subvert the power of the European expatriate monopoly capitalist.70 On the other side of the colonial divide, rural associations and cooperatives were used widely in British East and Central Africa by European settlers. They used these organizations to maintain marketing advantages over African farmers or Indian traders, and settlers also

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used cooperatives to keep lowering wages for their African workers. Settlers influenced how cooperative law took shape in colonies under their control. They tended to oppose “native cooperation,” disliking the competition but also concerned that successful African efforts with it would pull away labor from settler farms. Where settlers were powerful they were able to use legislative strategies to thwart African cooperatives, or in some cases they used the law to force cooperative marketing of African produce to benefit their own positions.71 And yet the interwar era was also a moment when colonial states reformulated their doctrines of rule around concepts of trusteeship and internationalism, looking (or at least appearing to look) to the League of Nations for guidance. The architects of the League of Nations mandates system did not intend them to be placeholders for eventual nation-­states but instead wanted to bolster and legitimize imperial rule.72 However, what was new with the League “was the apparatus and level of international diplomacy, publicity, and ‘talk’ that the system brought into being.” The League could not force mandate powers to govern differently, but “it obliged them to say they were governing differently.” It thus became a kind of publicity arena in which states and numerous groups (including Indigenous groups that petitioned the Permanent Mandate Commission’s Trusteeship Council over grievances) competed to represent the reality of empire.73 The new way officials talked about empire through the concept of trusteeship was not limited to discussions of mandate territories but rather spilled over into how the British discussed their rule in other places. Development discourse saturated British representations of their rule. Cooperatives were a big part and concretized community development. They gave officials and experts something to count and measure to show that British colonial governments were acting on plans for the economic uplift of colonial people, who were “not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” (as the League Covenant put the new “sacred trust”).74 It made sense to Lord Hailey, for instance, to record the progress of the British and French (and to a lesser degree other European powers) in starting cooperatives in the various territories he visited for his African Research Survey.75 We should view Strickland’s tours of territories in Africa in this context of interwar development “talk.” Regardless of whether his investigations spawned actual plans or those plans were fully enacted, his studies generated a tremendous amount of discussion of how cooperatives could become the key to community development and a one-­size-­fits-­all solution to stabilize social systems (and importantly, systems of rule) thought to be in distress. In Strickland’s reports, published writings, and lectures from his East African tours, he consistently depicted Indians as alien exploiters. “Agriculturists,” he thought, needed to be rescued from “nonagriculturists.” His ideal agent for developing Africa was the progressive peasant under the watchful eyes of European teachers and experts.

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Zanzibar The colonial state in Zanzibar from its origins was squarely behind an Omani Arab aristocracy. In the nineteenth century the Omanis brought enslaved Africans from the mainland to build a plantation system that came to dominate the world market in cloves. Slavery on the islands was “based on a combination of coercion and social dependence” that used the “whip and the stocks” but also allowed enslaved Africans to have small plots of land to use for their own subsistence or to sell produce at markets that they were able to access.76 British indirect rule of the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba was nominally through its protection of the sultan, and rule continued to be channeled through his rural structure of government through mudirs, who were now answerable to British authority. British military campaigns and gunboat diplomacy to take control of much of eastern Africa had been publicly rationalized as part of a global antislavery crusade. When slavery was abolished on the islands in 1897, the plantation system remained intact under Arab ownership, buttressed by British enforcement of Arab titles to land and clove trees and by marketing and labor laws intended to push formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants to work for wages on the clove plantations.77 In the 1920s and 1930s the colonial economy continued to revolve around cloves (and to a lesser degree copra), and British rule continued to be experienced by most people on the islands “as a routinized form of Arab supremacy.” The British were committed to making sure Zanzibar and Pemba remained spice islands and to upholding “Omani political dominance” and “Arabs’ economic dominance as a landholding caste.” As elsewhere in the empire, in the minds of officials these commitments were connected to a civilizing mission; here they saw Arabs as agents of uplift whose influence would help advance the islands’ majority non-­Arab population.78 However, there was a problem. As a consequence of a perfect storm of declining (and at times plummeting) world prices for cloves, high costs of wages for clove pickers, and deepening indebtedness to Indian intermediaries, officials now worried that their chosen ruling caste was in peril, on the brink of dispossession. Arab indebtedness to Indians was an issue before British rule, but the lack of good statistics (the British had never done a cadastral survey) meant that the government was in the dark about how extensive the problem was. Officials did not know how many growers carried considerable debt, and they had no real sense of how much land was transferring ownership. It was clear, though, even from the rough estimates coming in from various schemes to count owners and to count clove trees in the 1920s, that Arab growers were heavily encumbered and  that ­Indians were taking ownership of a growing share of the islands’ clove land. By the early 1930s the problem of Arab indebtedness and the quest to stabilize the Arab landowners had developed into “a fundamental test case of ­Britain’s political and constitutional relationship to Zanzibar’s Arab rulers.” For these reasons,

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and without any prodding from the Colonial Office, the Protectorate government started to consider cooperatives. The initiative came from inside the Protectorate’s Department of Agriculture, where in 1927 a small committee of officials formed to explore how they might use a marketing cooperative with the primary aim of organizing Arab plantation owners to collectively lower wages for African ­workers.79 Some descendants of enslaved Africans owned sizable plantations, but most had small plots on Arab-­owned plantations, where they tended their own trees and cultivated cassava and other food crops. At harvest many would work for wages for plantation owners. In addition, each year Africans from the mainland would travel to the islands for work during harvest, and numbers of the islands’ Indigenous people (Wahadimu and Wapemba) also traveled to the plantations for work. Almost every year, however, there was a shortage of clove ­pickers, which, according to Director of Agriculture V. H. Kirkham, drove up wages to such an absurd level that “not infrequently” the plantation owner had to pay in wages as much as the harvest was worth. If the government could find a way to control labor costs and provide credit facilities to clove growers, then it might be able to start to reverse what was to the government an alarming level of decay of the clove trees. As Kirkham put it, the inability of owners to finance their upkeep (that is, the labor-­intensive work of cutting down old trees, removing stumps, and planting new trees) was the “only vital problem” that Zanzibar faced.80 It was not lost on him that the French in Madagascar were planning a vast expansion of new clove trees, which raised the stakes on finding a solution in order to not lose out in market competition with a rival colonial power.81 Kirkham held meetings with leaders of the Arab Association, which represented the largest Omani landowners, and as a result of those meetings the Association agreed to organize a marketing association with the government.82 The Clove Growers Association (CGA) was formed in 1927 and began providing small seasonal loans, crop storage facilities, and marketing to plantation owners and leaseholders who joined. The CGA passed rules that required members to comply with the wage rates for pickers, though it struggled to enforce its rules in this case because the only penalty for not complying was suspension. This was why in Strickland’s model the law was integral—a cooperative community needed its members to be absolutely faithful to whatever were the cooperative aims of the society, and in ICS calculus this could only be ensured if the cooperative could penalize breaches of its rules and have those claims be backed up by British authority. The CGA was managed by the Department of Agriculture, but it also had district committees (nine in Zanzibar and fifteen in Pemba) that placed members in loose groupings.83 In addition to these measures, Protectorate officials decided to throw science and social science at their problems. They hired Strickland as their rural economist in hopes he would show them how to organize their way out of the debt crisis.84 He was given scope to go beyond the

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question of cooperation to explore all social questions that arose for him. Following Strickland’s visit, a silviculturist from the Imperial Forestry Institute at Oxford was brought to draft the government strategy for clove tree regeneration. Strickland spent about a month in Zanzibar meeting with officials; analyzing statistics (limited as they were); reading probate cases, insolvency cases, and civil suits; and interviewing clove growers. He had started to accumulate comparative knowledge about the empire’s “agriculturist” populations, at least in “the East.” He ranked them in order of their economic precarity. The Arab Zanzibari was not as badly off as the Arab Palestinian or the Swahili Zanzibari (by which he meant all non-­Arab, non-­Indian islanders). On the other hand, the Malay peasant was better off than all of them for having access to much more land to potentially move to (whereas on Zanzibar unused potential clove land was scarce).85 While keeping an eye on material conditions and economic positions, Strickland also scanned the groups he encountered for character traits that would qualify or disqualify them as a progressive peasantry. He had little, if anything, to say about the necessity of an Arab state and aristocracy (presumably he was in favor of them, since British indirect rule relied on them). He did not, however, believe that the current indebted Arab landowners necessarily had to be the agents of rural progress. There were other people on the islands who could assume that role. He thought that the group referred to as “Manga Arabs” by British officials would make ideal peasants. These were recent immigrants from Oman, and many were poor and fleeing destitution.86 Strickland heard stories of how some on arrival became shopkeepers, produce dealers, or moneylenders (who were “no more merciful than money­lenders of other races in Zanzibar”). But then, after acquiring a small estate or two, they would move onto the land and eventually would become “agriculturist[s] in temper and practice.” It was not necessarily bad if a “resident agriculturist” lost land to a Manga, he averred. “On the contrary, the new agriculturist family is better than the old. It is business-­like, energetic, and free from debt.” However Strickland saw a shadow over this future rural scene: the unthinkable possibility that Indian capitalists in the city would come to own most of the land. Rather than move to it as resident landlords, they would treat the land as “primarily a milch-­cow and source of income.” In this nightmare scenario, Strickland warned the Zanzibar government, the islands would be controlled by “an urban Indian oligarchy monopolizing the plantations and managing them through a dependent, indebted and spiritless tenantry of Arabs and Swahilis.”87 Strickland pressed the Punjab system on Protectorate officials, but he insisted they had to copy it completely. This would mean having a cooperative system of credit working in tandem with a decree to ban the transfer of land from agriculturists to nonagriculturists—in other words, a Zanzibar version of the Punjab’s Land Alienation Ordinance and its Cooperative Department. To apply one and not the other would be a useless half measure that would ruin the clove industry

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by ceding it to Indian capitalists. He did not recommend this anywhere else in Africa, as he considered rural indebtedness to be minimal on the mainland away from the coast. Strickland concluded that the crisis of indebtedness was so severe and the window of opportunity to cure it so narrow that agricultural credit had to be bracketed off into a separate scheme from the regular work of the Cooperative Department. He of course advised, as he did every government, that a Cooperative Department had to be created and run by a trained Registrar. There was work to be done on the character of agriculturists, and there was not time for the cooperative movement to gradually grow if Zanzibar wanted to save the clove industry; it could take decades before “the edifice was built”: up to thirty years, he thought, before the first societies the Registrar could manage to organize would replicate and federate into an efficient marketing body to handle the crop (and to compete with the French in Madagascar and their forty thousand acres of new trees). In the meantime, the clove industry would be at the command of “the dealers,” who would pay low prices for the crop. To stabilize the clove industry, he recommended the CGA should continue its seasonal credit function, but it should be registered as a cooperative. In the long term there should be cooperative societies of clove growers at the local level, which of course would achieve Strickland’s main goal of proliferating spaces of character discipline.88 Strickland’s study threw fuel on a debate about exactly how far the Protectorate government should go to curb land transfers, a debate that would be carried on in the following several years in the economic investigation of Zanzibar by Sir Alan Pim. The British resident Richard Rankine thought it was not feasible to pass a law restricting sales. Frank Stockdale—the Colonial Office’s top agricultural adviser—wondered what the actual social consequences would be of just letting the situation go on. How important was it that peasants own and tend the islands’ clove trees? He thought Strickland was going overboard in his reading of the land, land tenure, and labor situations of Zanzibar through Punjab administrative glasses. Was there not a difference between the upkeep requirements of seasonal crops, typical of Punjab peasants, and the trees of Zanzibar, that might be as easily attended by hired managers and wage laborers working for an absentee Indian landlord? Yet there were serious political concerns to worry about if no remedies could be found to cure Arab indebtedness and dispossession. Sir John Campbell, one of the key officials at the Colonial Office tasked with working out a plan of attack with the Zanzibar government in the wake of Strickland’s report, agreed with the picture of the Arab debt and land crisis painted by Strickland’s report. It was evident that Indians were “squeezing out the Arabs,” which would one day produce a “political problem of major magnitude.” “What is the dispossessed Arab going to do?” Campbell wondered. “He seems rather volcanic. Is he going to sit down under it, or resent it explosively?”89

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On the other hand, there were economic and political risks involved in intervening with a decree restricting land sales. Rankine was concerned that such an action would “upset the local economic and financial system” and exacerbate the islands’ political tensions. A meeting was convened at the Colonial Office with Strickland, Rankine, and several of the Colonial Office’s top advisers. Rankine vetoed Strickland’s land proposal, arguing that while the plan was in the Arabs’ best interest, enforcing such a restriction was simply untenable politically; it might be easily done outside the clove areas with land held by Africans on a “communal or semi-­communal basis,” but not in the clove areas. If the government suspended transfers on clove land (thus blocking Indian sources of credit to growers), both Indian and Arab communities were sure to protest, which could lead to “a racial controversy in which the Indian Government might take a hand.” Rankine downplayed the consequences of land transfers. The Arabs, despite their “thriftless habits,” would “continue to exist in Zanzibar” as the “principal cultivators of the soil.” Strickland could do nothing but forcefully object, challenging Rankine that not to intervene would doom the islands’ Arabs to be “gradually reduced to the state of impoverished tenants of grasping Indian landlords”; this would be a policy of “unparalleled heartlessness.” Only his own scheme, he was sure, provided the “practical means of saving the landowners from ruin, of securing them in the possession of their land” and of curtailing “the mischief” of “excessive credit facilities extended to them by Indian money-­lenders.” His land plan was essential if there were to be any hope of cooperation’s success in “the work of gradually building up their character, and improving their methods of cultivation and marketing.”90 The Zanzibar government did eventually attempt something in the realm of land restriction that Strickland was recommending. The Resident’s 1939 Land Alienation Decree made it a rule that a peasant could not sell so much of his property that he was unable to subsist with his family. Additionally, in 1937 a Clove Purchasing Decree briefly granted the CGA a monopoly on agricultural import-­ export, which blew up when commodity buyers in India decided to boycott Zanzibar cloves, so the decree was amended the following year to make way for merchant Indians. A Land Protection Decree in 1938 committed the government to buying up the debts of growers.91 Meanwhile, Strickland’s other proposal to start a Cooperative Department up to Punjab standards had fallen on its own trouble, ensuring that his land plan (or derivative thereof) and his cooperative plan would not be in place together. Cooperation, Strickland argued, had the potential to help all the agriculturists on the islands. He had recommended to the Zanzibar government that a new Cooperative Department should focus on the slow growth of building up the movement and working its gradual conversion of character, not just with Arab owners but with the poorer classes of African squatters and even Indigenous islanders, assuming they all would one day be part of a reconstructed peasantry.

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He schooled Zanzibar officials in the principles of cooperation as a political technology: “The real foundation of Co-­operation is, in fact, the reform of character.” Since it would take decades to effect the spiritual conversion, they had to think long term. He prescribed what was now becoming his boilerplate for transferring the technical machinery of the cooperative system. First was the indispensable Registrar: someone who could go beyond the necessary day-­to-­day cooperative organizing to “diagnose rural evils of every kind and collaborate with other departments of Government in curing them.”92 He needed to be “accustomed to touring, and ready to pitch his tent at a distance from the towns.” Strickland saw Zanzibar as he saw Malaya: a dead zone for sociological data (and he believed that his own study of “economic conditions” was revealing uncharted terrain). Whereas a government servant elsewhere might find all his answers in “published statistics and [land] Settlement records,” the Zanzibar Registrar would need to acquire firsthand familiarity with economic facts on the ground. This would be intimate work. He would need to visit people in their homes at first to evangelize cooperation, working especially with “the smaller men” (since the larger planters would more routinely interface with the staff of the CGA). It was crucial that the Registrar “speak Swahili freely and be sympathetic towards the people.”93 The person found for this role was J. S. Last. He appears to have been sent on the training tour of India and Europe that Strickland outlined for him. This would have included a scheduled long stop in Punjab.94 When he returned he started organizing his new department and a few societies. The system never really made it much further than planning, though. Its biggest problems sprang from the design of the system itself and the dilemma of needing to project its costs based on uncertain assumptions about existing demand. What was the real demand for the colonial cooperative system as promoted by Strickland? How much would it cost to realize that demand? Last was tasked with figuring this all out and then had to try to secure the funds from the larger colonial budget to fund his future work. The bureaucracy had to keep up with growth of the movement; that was one of the first principles of the idealized system as preached by Strickland. It seems that while in India Last had learned the formula for the ideal rate of growth in relation to the state’s capacity to control. Almost all the Cooperative Department’s budget had to go to the Registrar’s salary in order to recruit the right caliber colonial servant, which made sense in the theory of cooperative rule given that the Registrar was supposed to be the pivot of the whole movement.95 Spending on new personnel, meanwhile, would increase the department’s budget over time in diminishing ratio with the addition of new societies that the Registrar was able to start. There would need to be one new inspector hired for every thirty new societies (each between fifty and one hundred members), and the Protectorate would need to pay for a year’s training for each new inspector. This cost could potentially be heavy, as he expected a “large proportion of casualties among the Inspectorate.” Last

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surmised that with a total adult male population of less than 100,000, the island would have a maximum of one thousand societies, which might make it possible for the movement to start paying to inspect itself. More likely, though, the island’s true capacity was closer to five hundred societies. In all probability the Cooperative Department would become an irretrievable financial liability on the state. However, Last reminded higher-­up officials that the real “economic and social value of Co-­operation” could not be measured in “money terms.” “If it succeeds,” he wrote, “in its aim in educating in the business and social obligations of daily life the heads of households, and through them, their families and neighbours, the cost cannot be considered excessive.”96 His report sat on someone’s desk for about a year with no decision taken on whether to keep the new department open. Another factor in the troubled new department was that in the intervening months Last was himself the subject of disciplinary proceedings for allegations that are not at all clear in the Colonial Office or Zanzibar government archives, though there are indications that the controversy helped officials decide to close down the department. Two witnesses testified to the Executive Council that the Registrar had made “immoral suggestion[s]” to them. In a quick succession of confidential communiqués to the secretary of state, all arriving on the same day, the Acting Resident (Rankine was on leave) informed him of the less-­than-­hopeful financial assessment for the department, the Executive Council’s hearing of allegations against Last, and the Acting Resident’s own conclusion that, regrettably, the time was not right for cooperation in Zanzibar. The Conservative’s colonial secretary Philip Cunliffe-­Lister found the evidence against Last inconclusive (and apparently so did Rankine, who was in London when the hearing took place in Zanzibar), so he officially exonerated him. However, if the Cooperative Department was going to be closed down for budgetary reasons anyway (as Cunliffe-­Lister agreed it should be), then there really was no longer any need for a Registrar. Last was sent two official letters: one informing him that he had been exonerated and the other that he was being “retrenched” (reassigned).97 And that was all that was heard on the islands for the next fifteen years of Strickland’s cooperative system. The Cooperative Department was shuttered. The office of Registrar was dissolved. The library whose titles Strickland had recommended (at no personal gain to him—he insisted—though he had written a number of them) was moved to the Clove Growers Association, which continued to operate as the major provider of credit alongside Indian and Arab lenders.98 KNCU Strickland’s mission to Tanganyika Territory was not as concerned with social investigation as his trips to Palestine and Zanzibar were.99 The Tanganyika government wanted him to write a law to help them bring under strict control a cooperative movement of Chagga coffee growers that posed a threat to indirect rule in the

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Kilimanjaro area. The resulting 1932 Tanganyika Cooperative Ordinance would be the African model that he and the Colonial Office would push on governments (not always successfully, as illustrated by the example of settler-­dominated Kenya). The lines of sovereignty and political authority of indirect rule in Zanzibar also were completely different from the rest of British Africa. In Zanzibar, indirect rule meant governing an island with a majority African population through an Arab state that had been transplanted there in relatively recent Indian Ocean history.100 Tanganyika Territory was typical of other places in Africa where British rule was channeled through a Native Authority headed by chiefs. Strickland insisted cooperatives could work harmoniously with indirect rule. He argued that members of cooperatives in such contexts would, “without tearing the social fabric[,] . . . adapt its texture to fresh needs, grafting the modern on the ancient and combining all that is vital in the inherited tradition with that which is now indispensable for survival in the economic world.”101 This gradual “grafting in” was a favorite metaphor for the work of interwar indirect rule under the doctrine of trusteeship. It was the quality in the system that Lord Lugard extolled and made him want to rename indirect rule “cooperative rule.” However, Strickland saw a limited role for the Native Authority. Cooperatives should work “in connexion with the local authority, but not directly operated by it.”102 Tanganyika would test whether that was functionally possible given the politics of development in the territory. Tanganyika was supposed to be the proof that British administration was taking its interwar trusteeship mission seriously and ruling in the interests of Africans, but colonial order was paramount. The British implemented indirect rule when they took over the former German territory as a League of Nations mandate territory in 1922. The first priority of indirect rule was to strengthen British control by supporting the authority of the chiefs, who now received salaries from the state. Not only was the stability of British rule thought to depend locally on the chief’s authority, but Tanganyika officials also claimed to be striving for political development. They espoused a progressive theory that “supporting chiefs in the present was a means of working towards self-­government in the future.”103 The British influenced political thought in Tanganyika through these frames. Concepts of development were debated in Tanganyika’s public sphere, articulated in the Swahili words ustaarabu (civilization) and maendeleo (progress or development). These ideas had “clear Christian undertones” and came to be shaped through discussions of self-­help and associations.104 In addition, many saw the route to the material progress of maendeleo as one that necessarily passed through the Christian mission schools.105 These ideas were often also attached to cash-­crop cultivation, especially coffee development. Coffee growing drove a transformation in the social organization of land use and work on the mainland. Peasant societies—in which most people work small plots that they own or control for both subsistence and markets, utilizing

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mostly family labor—had existed among coastal peoples in Tanganyika long before European invasion. A pattern of “peasantisation” increased under German rule, but it was not until the 1920s under British rule that it started occurring inland in significant ways.106 As prices rose on the world market throughout much of the 1920s (before a prolonged slump in the early and mid-­1930s), African coffee growing skyrocketed. It flourished in the west of the territory in Buhaya near Lake Victoria, especially in Bukoba district, where in 1928 more than half the district’s eighty thousand taxpayers grew coffee, often employing workers who had migrated from the surrounding regions and who received meager wages but held plots on the land of their Haya employers.107 Coffee growing took off in Tanganyika’s mountainous north as well. Christian converts led the way, and they gained status in their communities by developing coffee and starting cooperative associations.108 At the same time, Africans selectively chose from European farming techniques and marketing practice and resisted others. Arusha and Meru formed associations but tended to resist attempts by the government in the 1930s and 1940s to control the terms of coffee marketing through the state-­imposed cooperative structure or by forcing marketing through the Native Coffee Board.109 This mixture of appropriation and opposition was a common stance of African farmers. Coffee grew well in multiple sites in the northern highlands and western Lake Victoria area, but the place that became most synonymous with coffee was (and still is) the region around Mount Kilimanjaro in the north near the Kenya border. There Chagga small-­plot farmers grew arabica coffee, which received a higher price than robusta beans (usually used in instant coffee). This was rare under colonial rule. British governments in East Africa tended to put up obstacles to arabica growing where coffee cultivation by Africans was allowed at all (it was not permitted in Kenya, where settler rule was most powerful). The 1920s through the 1940s saw gradual alienation of land to European settlement in the Kilimanjaro region, and even though their numbers were smaller in Tanganyika, European settlers were still a vocal lobby. The settlers’ Kilimanjaro Planters Association argued for a ban on African coffee growing, claiming that Africans’ farming methods were inferior and their trees disease prone (and thus a threat to settlers’ coffee). Their deeper concern was identical with that of their European brethren in Kenya: that African coffee growing would reduce the labor supply for settler estates and bring unwanted competition. Though the settlers were not successful in forcing a ban, their opposition was a catalyzing force in Chagga politics, prompting the formation in 1925 of the “nucleus of a marketing cooperative.” Following the advice of a district officer, the Kilimanjaro Native Planters Association (KNPA) was formed with the original purpose of pooling members’ funds to purchase spraying equipment, thereby counteracting the anti-­African arguments of the settlers by taking the sanctioned precautionary measures against disease.110 Soon the KNPA was bulking and cooperatively marketing a large share of the mountain’s coffee. It also

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collected and managed a fund from which members could borrow to improve their holdings. By the end of 1926 the KNPA had enrolled approximately ten thousand members on the mountain. It was structured with a central committee of representatives elected by members, and the committee in turn selected three mission-­educated officers to run the organization.111 The KNPA organized coffee growers mountain-­wide, transcending long-­ standing rivalries between some chiefdoms while existing entirely outside the structure of the Native Authority. The Council of Chagga chiefs did not rule the KNPA, and this grew worrying to officials committed to indirect rule.112 Moreover, the KNPA crossed the prohibited border between economic self-­help and Indigenous politics. Authorities were especially bothered by the sharp focus the KNPA put on land politics. Representatives of the farmers met with the Hilton Young Commission on “Closer Union” of the East African territories when it visited Moshi in 1928. Soon afterward, guided by concern that the Kenya settlers would have control under such an arrangement, the association passed a unanimous resolution to strongly object to any plans to unite Tanganyika with Kenya. Two years later leaders encouraged members to occupy land for potential sisal cultivation when it was learned that the government planned to alienate portions of the lower slopes of the mountain.113 The KNPA had created what many growers clearly saw as a space of political representation. As one district officer who was sympathetic to the KNPA put it, the association “ ‘stood for a moment in the role of champion of popular rights, with the chiefs occupying an ill-­defined position in the background.’ ” It served as a conduit to move political discussion quickly and widely around the mountain.114 The chiefs were troubled by the KNPA’s growing influence and by the way it centralized mountain politics. And while the Tanganyika government initially encouraged and supported the KNPA, by the end of the 1920s the association faced district and provincial officers who were hostile to it. They had to protect indirect rule, and that meant defending the chiefs from challenges to their power. At the same time, the KNPA had initiated something the British wanted by organizing the standards of cultivation and the activities of bulking and marketing for a key export crop. The British were not willing to give this up, and so they searched for means and pretexts to restructure it that would preserve the marketing efficiencies while smashing it as a vessel for Chagga politics. The final pretext for a top-­down restructuring was an embezzlement charge and conviction against the KNPA’s president, Joseph Merinyo (a charge he denied for the rest of his life and for which he spent six months in prison).115 The means for taking apart the society would be to restructure it as a cooperative, the Kilimanjaro Native Cooperative Union (KNCU). Tanganyika promulgated a cooperative law in 1932, the same year the KNCU was formed, and began to reorganize the mountain’s coffee growers into registered primary societies. This

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is where Strickland came in with his version of the cooperative movement that was already a form of anti-­politics. Strickland was tasked with advising the mandate government on a marketing system and with drafting the cooperative law and supplemental rules. The Cooperative Societies Ordinance that he helped to write was a hodgepodge of earlier legislation from Bombay, Ceylon, Burma, the Federated Malay States, South Africa, Queensland, and British Columbia.116 The detailed rules (which formed a section of the law but could be amended more easily by the Registrar) were copied clause by clause from the Punjab model with only minor omissions and revisions. Together they provided the kind of legal-coercive power that ICS experts had argued was needed as the ultimate backstop for when the technics of mutual risk and social persuasion broke down because of bad characters. The Registrar was even given supervisory powers to dissolve societies. The law made no specification about how different groups should be treated: Europeans, Indians, and Africans were all implicitly included on the same terms.117 Strickland wrote soon after its passage that the Tanganyika ordinance was “suited to Africans” because it gave the Registrar the necessary controlling powers, but there was “nothing to prevent European societies from prospering under it.”118 The Tanganyika government took some of Strickland’s advice but not all, pursuing its own instrumentality with cooperation that was principally concerned with controlling the geography of coffee and development politics, particularly on Kilimanjaro. The law and rules went into effect in 1932. The Registrar was established but not sent for training, and it was understood that he would spend much of his time dealing with Kilimanjaro. We can see by the way the Colonial Office experts analyzed Tanganyika’s plans how far Strickland’s idea that the cooperative movement for Asians and Africans should focus especially on character building had become the official orthodoxy in London. Stockdale was dismayed by Tanganyika’s waffling on whether it would pay to send an officer to India and Europe for training before he became Registrar, a study tour that Strickland plotted out for him. Stockdale, echoing Strickland’s arguments about control, advised that “co-­operation in native areas can only be built up by means of continuous instruction in co-­operation from the Registrar.” If Tanganyika meant to cut corners on the control side—establishing the law but not building up a proper Cooperative Department with a trained Registrar who would educate and supervise—then it was better not to pass the law at all and not to encourage Africans to form societies, since “the foundations of the movement are bound to be insecure.” Not only did Stockdale agree with Strickland’s prescription of caution, he also shared his view of African society in crisis on the cusp of social and cultural transformation. Through cooperation, Stockdale wrote, ventriloquizing Strickland, “the character and stability of a people can be built up and attempts at its introduction should not be delayed. . . . When tribal life has not been broken into there is a hope of success and, in the interests of the natives themselves, the attempt should not be unnecessarily delayed.”119

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The KNCU would go on to become the most well-­known cooperative organization in British Africa, the subject of films and cooperative movement publicity in Britain. The new organization was much more under the control of the chiefs and backed up by British power. The British planned to use it as the central hub of an organized coffee area, with depots and the Union’s constituent societies set up radially in the chiefdoms around the mountain. This element of the picture of cooperative development as part of colonial ideology needs to be brought to the front: how in some cases the British system of cooperative control was in the first place used to police the politics of rural associations. The KNPA was killed, as Susan Rogers writes, because its “strength and independent tendencies both in terms of economic interests and political implications for Kilimanjaro were perceived as threatening to the colonial administration.”120 In spite of its origins as anti-­politics, the KNCU was promoted on the mountain as a project of democratic tutelage, a guiding hand in the reorganization of work around cash crops, and a space of economic instruction. In a speech to an assembly of Kilimanjaro farmers in July 1937, the acting governor of Tanganyika emphasized that the Chagga themselves were in control of the cooperative movement on the mountain: “ ‘The K.N.C.U. is your organization; it is not Government’s. The Government supports it but it is yours, you can do what you like with it—you can keep it or you can break it.’ ” He struck the very common, condescending rhetorical pose in colonial Africa of the teacher translating complex concepts into simple language for adult students: “Coffee of the K.N.C.U.,” he explained, “is known amongst those who drink coffee Overseas and who buy it; they do not know it as the coffee of this one, or that one, or the other one, they know it as K.N.C.U. coffee and if it were not for this mark, now well known overseas, it would not be bought by those people.”121 The Kilimanjaro cooperatives were to link with a wider development complex that was targeting maximization and standardization of coffee for overseas markets. In 1934 the government opened a 310-­acre coffee research station at Lyamungu near Moshi to experiment with plant breeding and growing techniques. The European manager of the KNCU was on the board of directors for the station.122 The specific way the law was framed and awkwardly implemented in Tanganyika reveals some of the contradictions that racial paternalism produced in British community development. Focused on Kilimanjaro and determined to steer Chagga-­produced coffee through a single channel, the Tanganyika government, on the advice of Strickland, drew on a cooperative tool that was used in some contexts in European marketing cooperatives but was actually controversial among cooperators: the legal enforcement of compulsory marketing. In the cooperative law he wrote for Tanganyika, Strickland included a provision that allowed a cooperative marketing society that managed to enroll 75 percent of the farmers in an area to petition the Registrar for a monopoly. If it was granted, all growers in the defined area, regardless of whether they were co-­op members, would have to

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market their produce through the cooperative at the price given to members. The KNCU applied for a mountain-­wide monopoly under the provision. However, there was a political catch. How would a compulsory marketing area be defined? The law, as passed in 1932, was to be applied equally to all growers. Settlers objected to the KNCU bid on the grounds that they should not have to market their coffee through an African-­run cooperative, which they claimed would depreciate the value. Settler and African farms on the mountain were too close together to carve out a growing area that left settlers out of a KNCU monopoly area. The solution the government struck was to grant the exclusive marketing monopoly, but to appease the settlers, instead of using the new cooperative law the monopoly was granted by the Chagga Council, which made it only applicable to Chagga farmers. The provision came to be known as the Chagga Rule, and it exacerbated tensions between factions on the mountain, forcing all African coffee farmers to market through an organization that many believed was a corrupt arm of bad chiefs. The main offices of the KNCU were in Moshi Town, but there were constituent societies established in each chiefdom, and at that local level “the old geographical/­ political/administrative framework of the chiefdom was reproduced in the local cooperative society.” It was common, for instance, for society chairmen to come from chiefly lineages and for the governing committees to be composed of representatives from each of the subdistricts that had been defined in the chiefdom since before colonial rule. The chiefs’ courts enforced the KNCU’s rules; so, for instance, a farmer who allowed his trees to become infested with destructive insects was fined and then threatened with nine days in jail if he did not pay.123 The setup fused the KNCU with the Native Authority too well, subjecting the cooperative to intense criticism from farmers for its close ties to the chiefs. The belief that the KNCU was the agency of government, and not an authentic cooperative, was widespread. People on the mountain had a recent memory of mass meetings of the old KNPA that had given expression to African peasant politics. There was not room for that kind of politics in the KNCU; its structure of representation contained members’ voices to their primary society alone.124 The Chagga Rule became a focal point of protest. Initially the government tried to minimize the numbers of dissidents, putting the protest down to the actions of a small number of “malcontents” and “agitators” with a few “ring-­leaders.” However, it became clear as confrontations escalated that the opposition had a substantial following on the mountain. Dissident leaders, some of them connected to the old KNPA, worked two constitutional strategies: they ran for election in the KNCU primary societies in an attempt to gain control of the organization, and they sued in British higher courts to end the Chagga Rule. The protest movement was particularly strong in Machame chiefdom and aligned against the local chief, Abdiel Shangali, whom the British considered to be an ally in promoting and controlling Chagga coffee growing. Political tensions on the mountain rose in 1935 when

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prices for coffee bottomed out after Brazil flooded the world market.125 Farmers were supposed to get a payout twice each year: once when they turned over their coffee to the KNCU for marketing, and then a dividend after the crop was sold. In 1935 the second payment was canceled. Farmers not only had to contend with falling prices, but the leadership of the KNCU had kept the severity of the shortfall hidden from the growers. When news of the canceled dividend leaked in the press, more than fifteen hundred protesters gathered at Machame Central.126 Calls to end compulsory marketing intensified, as did criticisms of the chiefs. When the British reported the events to the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations later, they explained that “there was reason to believe that [the agitators’] criticism was not confined to the Union, but was levelled in somewhat violent terms against constituted authority.” “The chief,” the official report to the League concluded, “found himself subject to undisguised contempt at their hands while the subordinate staff of the Native Administration were either ignored or obstructed in the performance of their duties.” In response, four “ringleaders” were convicted by the Native Court on charges of “a breach of the tribal order which forbade the holding of meetings without the permission of the chiefs and elders.” All four received six-­month prison sentences, and upon release two of them were deported to an outlying district.127 More dissidents were deported over the next several years on orders of the governor, without any of the accused being allowed to hear the evidence against them or to speak in their own defense. The Colonial Office made inquiries and was assured by the Tanganyika government that legal precedent was being found in Chagga custom for the rule that meetings could not be held in secret. But the record suggests that the search for custom may have followed the implementation of the punishment, since its legitimacy was a disputed question in the Colonial Office. Opinion in the Colonial Office was split about whether the deportations were justified. Sir H. G. Bushe wrote in a minute: “It may be native law, but I feel pretty sure that it would not long remain native law were it not that it is backed by British bayonets.”128 “Can we say that we are satisfied that the Chagga who were deported fully deserved their punishment, when we have no facts upon which to form any conclusion at all?”129 Petitions from the deported Chagga “agitators” through their lawyers provide a clearer sense of their supposed crimes and make clear as well just how far the government (both the Native Authority and the British who backed up and carried out the sentences) was willing to go in defense of its tight control over cooperative marketing. One of those deported, Daud Ngamini, was a son of the former chief of Machame and was a cousin of Chief Shangali. In late 1935 he was elected chairman of the local KNCU branch in Machame Central. The election was quashed as illegal by the provincial commissioner. Ngamini was later arrested and convicted of illegal assembly by the Chagga Native Council and deported by the governor.

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Like the other deportees, he was not allowed to hear the evidence against him. The entire explanation for the deportation of another “agitator,” Asser Ephraim, a teacher, appears to have been that he was elected “to take correct minutes of the meetings to prevent their being misreported by the chief”; he let his typewriter be used to write letters to the provincial commissioner; and he joined with others in consulting a lawyer and raising funds for legal fees. For those offenses he was sentenced to six months in prison, then deported.130 The attempt by dissidents to take over the local societies was thwarted, but it was now clear to everyone just how far the KNCU was from being a democratic space. Not only was it fully part of colonial rule, but that rule was increasingly repressive. The deportees called attention to the gap between the rhetoric and reality of British cooperative development. The British were preaching that cooperatives were spaces for practicing representational democracy. The d ­ eportees mocked as “vain words” the insistence of the acting governor that “the proper place to voice their discontent is through their society.”131 The second strategy of suing to end the Chagga Rule also failed. The British High Court dismissed the appeal in early August. Over the next month a new wave of protests was galvanized among Machame growers, led by an elderly former mission teacher, Tobias Masaki. He was among the “ringleaders” of the 1935 alleged “secret meetings” and for that had spent six months in prison, but owing to his advanced age he was not deported.132 As protests mounted again, the new action targeted the infrastructure of the godowns (storehouses) and weigh stations that the new KNCU had set up in each chiefdom to receive the coffee of African farmers throughout the monopoly area. Farmers were paid the same price as at Moshi central station and were told they were not allowed to bring the coffee to the central station themselves but had to deliver their coffee to the outlying godowns. This was another blow, since a number of the dissident farmers also owned trucks, and part of their income in years past had come from hauling growers’ coffee to Moshi. The KNCU management instead tended to employ Indian truck drivers.133 The protesters focused their action on the godowns. When it came time to sell the year’s crop in September 1937, a small crowd of people went from one station to the next across Machame and boarded up the windows of the chiefdom’s three stations, sending the clear message that there would be no coffee processed through the stations. Chief Abdiel alerted British authorities of the forced closure of the godowns in ­Machame; administrative officers and police rushed to the scene and followed in the train of the crowd, undoing the boarding up they had done. This only escalated the protest action. The acting governor tried to minimize the protests in his official account to the Colonial Office, claiming they were “fomented and instigated by a comparatively small number of malcontents.” There was no hiding, though, that the protests had a great deal of popular support. A crowd of about

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200 went back to each of the reopened stations and demolished the godowns and weighing apparatus across Machame and Marangu chiefdoms. Protesters, both men and women, then started to congregate at Machame Central, staying through the night, and the crowd grew to some 2,000 people by the next afternoon, including about 150 women; the protesters apparently planned to destroy the stone masonry office of the KNCU in Machame. By then the provincial commissioner had arrived, and he ordered the police to disperse the crowd. A force of about thirty police moved on the crowd. The women surged to the front, “encouraging their menfolk and hurling defiance at the police.” The police beat people with their rifle butts, and the crowd dispersed.134 The Royal Air Force sent planes to “restore confidence” at Moshi, flying low over the area in a maneuver designed to present the threat of force and thereby prevent or disperse crowds.135 The strategy backfired when Italian radio broadcasts falsely claimed that the planes had attacked civilians. To confuse matters, the BBC’s initial Empire News Bulletin falsely reported that the protesters had used bombs to blow up KNCU buildings. Meanwhile the Daily Mail called the RAF planes “bombers.” The question of bombing took over the press coverage, requiring the Colonial Office to do damage control.136 This was, after all, a time when the world was shocked by stories of aerial bombardment of civilians (infamously by the Italians in Ethiopia and by Hitler in support of the Fascists against republicans in Spain). The Moshi events produced a propaganda skirmish focused on the British reaction. The Italian Fascist newspaper Il Tevere reported that the planes and police had “machine-­gunned the huts and the masses of revolting tribesmen,” who were stirred by “the Bolshevik propaganda which is invading the whole of South Africa.”137 The Japanese press seized on the Italian reports, calling the RAF action a massacre of civilians that exposed British hypocrisy (Britain had just condemned Japan’s bombing raids on Chinese cities). An important element of the reporting in Britain, and part of what kept the story in the headlines, focused on how the events were being distorted by foreign propaganda to discredit British rule.138 The controversy surrounding the protest and the question of how far the British went in their police actions managed to bring the rocky path of colonial cooperative development briefly into view for Britons in the metropole. But it was a fragmented and mostly incoherent backdrop to the story. The papers mangled the causes of the protesters’ discontent, mainly reporting it as a reaction to falling prices. There was worried reaction in the Colonial Office when it was learned that filmmaker R. Kingston-­Davies, who specialized in geography films for British classrooms, was planning to produce an educational film featuring the Chagga that would reference the disturbances and possibly depict them as a story of popular reaction to “a feeling of land-­hunger.” It seems odd that such a small-­time producer would be such a concern. However, he was brought to the Colonial Office for consultation on the project and was pressured to leave out mention of land politics, which officials

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insisted played no part in the protest. They intimated that should he actually discuss land-­hunger, they would publicly refute him. Officials said the filmmaker left promising to stick to the official account, though it is not clear whether the film was even made.139 In fact inside the Colonial Office, the land-­hunger among the Chagga was an understood fact and considered to be an important context of the protests. As Mr. Lee wrote in a lengthy minute several weeks after the protest: Nevertheless, one must face the fact that recurrent trouble is possible with the Chagga since not only are they a somewhat emotional people, but their difficulties are deep-­seated, particularly in the matter of land . . . the fact is that (dating from the days before the War) there has been an excessive alienation of land to non-­natives in the Kilimanjaro area and in consequence of this the Chagga, with increasing numbers, find themselves hemmed in within an area of land between European farms and mountain forest reserve which is rapidly becoming inadequate for their needs.140

In public, officials in London and in the Tanganyika administration tended to portray the “disturbances” not as related to land questions or as part of a movement against British indirect rule, but as an outburst of political antagonisms that were entirely internal to Chagga society, or they presented them as misdirected anger at falling coffee prices on the world market. These were convenient screens, but in fact the protests were an indictment of British indirect rule, and we should interpret them as a forceful rebuttal of the emerging British narrative about how democracy in Africa would grow through cooperative development. However, the Colonial Office emphasized in its report to the League of Nations that the whole episode showed how well the British were doing with trusteeship. “In some cases,” they reported, “the arrests were made by the native authorities before the administrative officers,” which showed how well the British collaborated with the chiefs.141 This view was endorsed by the Permanent Mandates Commission. The episode did not show cracks in the British system of indirect rule; it showed the system’s strength.142 In the end the KNCU survived, and in time it would restore its reputation with Chagga farmers.143 However, given the intensity of the protests and the importance of the KNCU as the most famous success story of cooperative development in British Africa (at least in commercial terms), one might have expected more of a debate in development circles about whether the British-­guided cooperative movement was measuring up to its touted potential as both an incubator of democratic values and habits and a framework of community development that was compatible with indirect rule. But already that idea of the cooperative movement had become fixed in colonial development discourse, so that even controversial episodes like the protests and British repression could do little to dislodge it. When the Chagga protesters countered that they were forced to be part of the cooperative and yet were locked out of power in the society, their critical arguments were

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ignored. After the war, a Fabian Colonial Bureau special committee on the progress of colonial cooperation looked back at the disturbances and placed most of the blame on secret German machinations to discredit the British regime. The committee acknowledged that there were some elements of the system—like the Registrar’s power over the selection of the society’s manager or the compulsory marketing provision—that might not seem true to cooperative principles. However, these were temporary and necessary at the current position of the Chagga on the path toward progress. For the moment, the simulation of democracy was working a political conversion, as an official’s firsthand description of a KNCU meeting proved: It [the KNCU] provides an excellent means of political education for the progressive young Chagga, teaching him how to conduct himself and to express his thoughts in a constitutional manner. To attend the meetings of its primary societies is illuminating. They are conducted on the basis of free speech, delivered with proper decorum, and enable the peasant to express himself on a variety of subjects concerned with his welfare, as, for example, crops and prices and the proper use of land. There can be little doubt that these meetings are largely responsible for the growth of a healthy public opinion on such matters. The Union is run by comparatively young and well-­ educated men and affords plenty of scope for the younger generation in the tribe to display their energies and abilities in an orderly and progressive manner.144

Such a description of a “free speech” environment is at odds with the fact that the British government in Tanganyika had been only too glad in 1937 to back up the chiefs by imprisoning and deporting critics of the KNCU for the crime of meeting in secret. In fact, the Fabian committee seems to have taken its description of the KNCU primary society meetings straight from a Tanganyika government source written in defense of the government’s actions in imprisoning and deporting a number of KNCU cooperators, including the once-­elected chairman of a primary society.145 If the peasant politics of Kilimanjaro only briefly and incoherently appeared in news reporting in Britain, in other places in East Africa the Chagga protests and political mobilization around coffee growing and marketing were reported on and followed more closely. In Uganda a lobby that joined European estate owners with Indians who bulked, processed, and traded cotton and coffee was successful at defeating attempts to introduce a cooperative law. The lobby pointed to the dangerous example of the societies in Tanganyika and argued that as African cooperatives grew, they were sure to become “politically powerful” and would be run by “young and radically-­minded natives.” Even so much as passing a governing ordinance like the Tanganyika law, they warned, might give sufficient publicity to the movement to potentially pose a threat to the economic position of the non-­African communities.146

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In Kenya European settlers had gotten out in front of the cooperative law-­ making business to make sure it worked for them and only them. The colony’s settler-­dominated Legislative Council passed a hastily written cooperative ordinance in 1931, the same year that Strickland visited Zanzibar and Tanganyika and drafted the exemplary Tanganyika Cooperative Ordinance that he and Colonial Office experts would suggest for governments if they were sincere about using cooperation to advance the aims of trusteeship and “native paramountcy.” The government of Kenya refused Sidney Webb’s appeal to have Strickland tour the colony. Even worse, Kenya broke with protocol to pass its law without consulting the Colonial Office, which annoyed Colonial Office permanent officials and made them at least contemplate using Whitehall’s power to disallow the bill and request a new one. In the estimation of Colonial Office experts, the law, based on a South African model, was clearly designed with large-­scale, limited-­ liability marketing cooperatives and credit and insurance cooperatives in mind— cooperatives that were being formed by the European settlers.147 Notably absent from the Kenya government’s cooperative law were the crucial components of supervision and control. Stockdale concluded that if Africans started societies under the law, there was sure to be “a crop of defalcation and other difficulties.”148 Another adviser summed up the problem with a litany of Stricklandisms: “The law is suited to the European purpose, and while it is legally possible for a native co-­operative society to be registered under that Ordinance. . . . [It is] wholly unsuited to primitive societies, and to allow native cooperation in the Reserves to develop under its provisions would lead only to disaster and a consequent setback for many years. On the other hand, to legislate separately for native societies would be a flagrant exercise of racial discrimination, and such action could not possible [sic] be defended in Parliament or elsewhere.”149 The Colonial Office’s solution was to declare the law unsuitable for Africans and request the government of Kenya to prohibit the registration of cooperative societies on the Reserves. It thereby provided the unexpected twist that in a colony dominated by settlers who were loath to see Africans grow and sell cash crops—much less to do so in a cooperative—the idea to ban Africans on the Reserves from registering cooperative societies came from the Colonial Office and on firm grounds of interwar trusteeship.150 Nor were Africans the only ones sidelined from legal cooperation in 1930s Kenya. The Aga Khan’s Ismaili Council of Nairobi wanted to start an Ismailia Cooperative Society in Nairobi like the one already operating in Dar es Salaam. Any Ismaili would be able to buy shares, and the idea was first to provide small loans to members but then to eventually start consumer shops. Since the 1931 Kenya law did not make provision for consumer societies, they were not allowed to register. The Aga Khan’s Council tried in vain through petitions over several years to convince the Kenya government to either change the law (the council

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wanted the government to copy Strickland’s Tanganyika law instead) or make a special allowance for this society.151 The Kenya case might tell us something about the difference that party politics in Britain could make to community development effects in Africa. Party clearly did not determine everything when it came to moving and translating the cooperative idea between colonial governments; Strickland was already on his first gig as a traveling expert (to the Federated Malay States) when Labour briefly took power in 1929, and as we saw, in places like Zanzibar and Tanganyika officials already were mulling over the question of how to control rural associations or otherwise steer the conduct of “agriculturists” by using cooperatives. And yet in 1932, after the collapse of that short-­lived Labour government, Kenya’s rogue law did not draw the new Conservative secretary of state Cunliffe-­Lister’s disallowance of the bill. Instead, he stated in his letter to the Kenya governor that he trusted that “opportunity will no doubt be taken” to revise the law in accordance with Colonial Office recommendations.152 Nearly fifteen years later it still had not been revised. Had Sidney Webb remained in office, might there have been a greater likelihood that he would have used this veto power? This seems especially possible given his enthusiasm for developing a colonial cooperative movement based on Strickland’s principles and the fact that during Webb’s short term in office he had been preoccupied with East African land questions and what he feared was a looming “race war” in Kenya.153 •

•

•

Strickland’s interwar missions could not be called a success, not by his own measure. He later concluded, rightly or wrongly, that the stagnation in pushing a colonial cooperative movement under the ICS model was the fault of the downfall of the Labour government in 1931.154 However, there are several points to underscore before closing this chapter to help us see more precisely where things stood with the idea of making cooperation the engine to drive community development in the British empire and with the politics and colonial ideology swirling around it. In all the places Strickland visited there were political crises with deep rural dimensions tied to the colonial economy. Strickland presented cooperation as a technopolitics, but it was one that colonial states could wield in their own ways that did not partake in his grand vision of “a means of permeating the whole sociology of the people” for rural reconstruction, although that vision won acolytes in the Colonial Office and among semi-­celebrity imperial statesmen like Lord Lugard and Sir Donald Cameron (governor of Nigeria and former governor of Tanganyika). However, those gains were not insignificant. The converts in the 1930s made sure that the gospel of Strickland was still with them, or they passed it on to the next generation of advisers so it was there when Labour’s Colonial Office rolled out its postwar plan to organize the system everywhere in the empire.155 However, in

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Tanganyika, what had he done in the short term except assist that government in organizing and legally binding coffee growers into distributed cooperative groups in order to disconnect them from a powerful, centralizing challenge to unpopular chiefs, the chosen rulers that the British were all-­in to defend? Strickland defended the empire and indirect rule. He never seemed to regret that he did that work, only that the Tanganyika government had not gone forward to cultivate the spaces of moral discipline that he knew—after a career of absorbing Punjab moral and economic theory himself—held the true key to community development. Likewise in Zanzibar—where he spent much more time, as he did in Palestine, studying the social situation—he lent his expertise to a Protectorate government that wanted to stabilize a ruling Arab aristocracy and gentry against the economic and political encroachment of African laborers and Indian dealers and lenders. The cooperative system he recommended for the “smaller men” was important to him but not to the Zanzibar government, which must ultimately explain why the government closed the Cooperative Department within two years of its founding and did not try to reopen it again for another decade (otherwise officials would have funded the department and either kept Last in his position or replaced him with a new Registrar). Of course World War II intervened, too, which is another important point to underscore. The war was the reason Sierra Leone had to abort its attempt to copy the system. Strickland was supposed to visit that territory in 1934 as one stop on his West Africa tour supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and backed by the Colonial Office and Cameron in Nigeria. He got sick in Nigeria, though, and had to cancel his trip to Sierra Leone. Nigeria, for its part, got things underway building Strickland’s system after his visit. It helped in Nigeria that Cameron was governor and, at the worst point in the Great Depression, was looking for inexpensive, self-­help welfare solutions (and in accordance with Strickland’s general philosophy was convinced that the real source of economic hardship for rural Nigerians was not the global crisis or any failure of government to respond but rather “ ‘extravagance [and]’ improvidence’ and the lack of thrift”).156 Nigeria sent officers to India for cooperative training, quickly passed a cooperative law, and founded a department to oversee its work of education and character training. The work of social reconstruction was moving slowly, inch by inch, just as Strickland preached.157 What was missing in most other places he visited was that final crucial piece: education. We have seen that Strickland believed that the impediments to progress ultimately stemmed from “unstable character,” which in Punjab and on his travels he mapped according to race (even if he thought the difference was made by culture and environment rather than biology). He also found there were different ways of knowing that created obstacles to thinking economically, and cooperation could not grow without this economic mode of thought. As he told

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the government of the Federated Malay States, “the chief weakness of the ‘Malay race’ ” that held down its living standards was “indifference to economic consequences.”158 He found a similar problem with Africans: an inability to appreciate the abstractions of market relations. Strickland argued that when dealing with coins (or “discs of metal . . . that have a token value unrelated to the intrinsic value of the metal within them”) “the African loses all touch with reality.”159 At the same time Strickland saw such “backward” minds as educable and believed cooperatives could be ideal spaces of practical learning in which that missing economic fluency could be gained. It was important for cooperative departments and education departments to collaborate closely, which they did in Punjab. If cooperation was to become “a plan of rural and national reconstruction” for “a backward or a socially disintegrated country,” then the cooperator and the educator needed to be like mason and carpenter, building a house and working from “a common architectural design.”160 For this reason Strickland requested in advance of his trip to Palestine that his article “Co-­operation and the Schoolmaster” be distributed widely among the officials he would be meeting there. As we will see in the next chapter, missionary educators in Africa—the self-­ proclaimed custodians of the soul, experts on the “African mind”—already were thinking along similar lines about how to work cooperatives into pedagogy as a way to train economic thinking and for building up character. Some were, in fact, avid readers of Strickland’s work and wanted to work with cooperative rule.

2

Pedagogies of Community Development

In October 1933 Joseph Oldham wrote to Frederick Keppel, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, to outline a vision of community development for Africa that would require planning and experimentation—and hopefully Carnegie financial backing—to realize. Oldham, a Scottish Presbyterian and the most influential Christian voice of his day on British colonial matters, wanted to take Strickland’s formula for cooperative rural reconstruction to its next phase in Africa, framing it as a problem of rural adult education and scientific study. Africans needed to be trained in cooperative principles, and their attempts at cooperation needed to be studied. “As Strickland has all along seen,” Oldham wrote, “the next step after advice has been given and the lines of policy laid down, is to get an experiment carried out—possibly in two or three different centres in Africa.” It was the “only way” to judge “how far the principles of co-­operation, which have proved so successful among rural communities in India, are suited, and can be adapted, to African conditions.” Oldham suggested Tanganyika Territory around Moshi as a flagship for the experiment, not least because Philip Mitchell, the territory’s secretary for native affairs, had a “keen personal interest in the question,” which would ensure the government’s help.1 However, it was of “secondary importance” where in Africa the cooperative experiments should be set up, so long as the experiments were conducted under “the most favourable conditions.” At minimum what was needed was the secondment of a government officer, trained in cooperative principles, who could spend three to five years assisting African farmers in setting up cooperatives. Oldham was asking Keppel to be the sole funder of the experiment; it needed a thousand pounds per year to stay afloat. This was the height of global economic depression, and Oldham reminded 61

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his New York friend that Tanganyika’s government was “financially on the rocks and has not a penny to spend on new ventures however greatly they are needed” (as we saw in the last chapter, the government was not willing after Strickland’s visit there to spend funds to send an officer to in India). But more than American money was needed. Oldham told Keppel that he thought colonial governments and Christian missions had much to learn from America “in the field of rural betterment.” Assistance in this field was “one of the important contributions which America can make to the rest of the world.”2 Keppel was quick to offer funds.3 Oldham was his trusted adviser on African issues. Oldham had played a pivotal role in bringing government, missionaries, and American corporate philanthropy into a united community development mission in Africa. He was a key figure in the 1920s in organizing the important tours of the Phelps-­Stokes philanthropy in Africa that helped to push the Colonial Office toward an adapted model of education that focused on lessons from the local environment and on instruction in vernacular languages (which Oldham called “the principal avenue to the soul of African peoples”).4 Keppel and Oldham already were collaborators on major projects, including Lord Malcolm Hailey’s soon-­to-­be-­famous African Research Survey.5 Oldham’s points about the need to focus administrative and philanthropic resources on cooperative development were familiar to Keppel, who was well-­versed in the cooperative gospel of Strickland. Keppel had met with Strickland and talked cooperatives in London the year before. This new request from Oldham for funding for Strickland-­esque experiments arrived just as Strickland himself was about to set off on his Carnegie-­ backed study tour of British West Africa. Oldham’s argument for experiments with cooperatives in Africa followed from what he believed was an “indisputable” thesis about the direction of African development. Given the economic fact that the basis of African life was agricultural, he argued that the “primary objective of both the administrative and the educational policies of governments should be the creation of a healthy, progressive peasantry and the development of a stable rural life.” This matched Strickland’s vision perfectly. Oldham’s interest in cooperatives was not unique in the missionary world. He was articulating what was to become by the end of the 1930s a mainstream missionary view about them as part of rural reconstruction. But this leaves the questions at the heart of this chapter: How did missionaries like Oldham arrive at the conclusion between the wars that the cooperative movement should be the basis for African development? And how did this work in theory and practice as part of an evolving Christian mission to the colonial world? It was not simply a matter of Oldham moving in the technocratic circles of Colonial Office agricultural specialists and bringing their prescriptions for development into mission education. Before Sidney Webb sent Strickland on his first African tour, the idea of developing Africa with cooperative rural reconstruction was

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already becoming an article of faith in a new, modern world mission. This turn was greatly influenced by American rural economics and planning and by American theories about racially adapted education systems and pedagogies. The mission was further shaped by a Christian rural sociology that saw the evangelistic capacity in cooperatives and community development along with the promise of material uplift. Leading missionary advocates viewed cooperatives as an important part of a set of rural community institutions that could perform spiritual work among individual members and also allow new churches around the world to be self-­supporting. While they operated in a spiritual register, missionaries were nonetheless accepting modernist ideas about redirecting the trajectory of social change through rural economic science. In Africa, missionary community developers looked beyond the crisis of social change to imagine reconstituted communities with thriving rural institutions: schools, cooperatives, community halls, health clinics, churches, and instructional cinemas. They wanted a scientific and systematic approach to the expansion of community development through education, which for them required a long-­term link to the colonial metropole. The content of instruction was to be practical agricultural method for a cooperating peasantry in the making. Laboratory schools operated by missionary educationists linked into international networks of scholarship and practical experiment. They developed new methods for deploying the lessons of community development to village schools. Cooperative shops and credit societies under European supervision would teach practical business skills and moral lessons, and they also would generate scientific knowledge about cooperatives in African hands that would be reported, in the hope of standardizing how missions and government should approach cooperative development as a project of education. Missionary educationists who saw their work in terms of a rural mission engineered experiments to mediate community development for the rural “African mind,” a construct forged partly through the educational experiments in rural reconstruction that missionaries took part in. Missionaries used social action centers, mission teacher-­training and rural reconstruction units, and a variety of publicity tools, including film, to spread the message of British-­guided community development. C H R I S T IA N RU R A L S O C IO L O G Y

Two new trajectories in world Christianity shaped community development education in Africa and the place of cooperatives within it. First was the fact that the Christian evangelical mission became more ecumenical and internationalist during the interwar era. Missionary leaders worked across denominational and national boundaries, and missionary educators studied the work of their counterparts in far-­flung mission fields regardless of denomination. The second

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important shift was that missions now focused much more on the material base of life of would-­be converts in the mostly rural mission fields of the world, which led some to argue that community development was a necessary supporting structure for new churches in the colonies. Major international conferences of Protestant missionaries from the 1910s through the 1930s were occasions for driving a “ ‘social gospel’ ” mission further into the center of missionary policy and practice. These also became important arenas of discussion about colonial education.6 The World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910 brought missionary society representatives from numerous Protestant churches together to discuss problems facing missions and to focus planning. The conference adopted the Student Volunteer Movement slogan, which gave the Great Commission an apocalyptic deadline: “the evangelization of the world in this generation.” The Edinburgh conference was an important moment in the development of missionary thinking about colonial education. It included a systematic treatment of African education. Thomas Jesse Jones, then of the Hampton Institute but soon to take up his post at the influential Phelps-­Stokes fund, contributed a paper on adapted education in the US South.7 In advance of the summer conference, commissions of mostly British and American scholars produced reports on key themes that circulated among the missionary delegates.8 The Education Commission concluded that missionaries in Africa needed to bring an industrial and agricultural focus to education “adapted to the needs of the native races,” citing Hampton and the Tuskegee Institute as models.9 The ecumenism and internationalism of the 1910 Conference contrasted with the norm of Protestant missionary activity, which up to then had been “as intensely national as it was denominational.”10 More important than the conference itself for internationalizing Protestant missions was the Continuation Committee, which allowed the momentum of missionary ecumenism to survive the war. During the interwar years this evolved into something like a “central governing body reshaping missionary strategy” collaboratively led by Oldham; the American Methodist John Mott, who chaired the 1910 conference and would go on to lead the YMCA; and English Presbyterian William Paton.11 The new community development mission was best spelled out at the 1928 Jerusalem meeting of the International Missionary Council (IMC). The conference placed special focus on the church and the “rural problem” and the ideas of influential American rural sociologist Kenyon Butterfield, who was a keynote speaker at the conference.12 Butterfield’s challenge to the Protestant missionaries at Jerusalem was to center mission work on “the local community or rural village” as the “unit of endeavour.”13 “Rural civilization,” he argued, “will become economically efficient and socially Christian only as these natural local groupings or units of people do their work efficiently and live their lives in Christian spirit.”14 The direction of social development in these rural units must evolve to be less

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competitive and more cooperative, and the church and missions had a vital role to play in this social conversion. It was a mantra he had been reciting for a long time, and he believed it was a lesson as applicable to world missions as it was to the rural church in the United States. In his 1911 book The Country Church and the Rural Problem, he predicted that cooperative community would soon supersede capitalistic social relations, and that “the welfare of the rural community instead of the profit of the individual will be more and more the point of departure in all discussions and movements for rural betterment.”15 Industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and other factors, he argued, were altering American rural life, making it necessary to take a planner’s approach to developing rural civilization. He was then writing about the American settler colonial context and speaking in terms of shoring up Anglo-­Saxon civilization.16 What were needed to revitalize settler rural community were physical spaces and shared activities around which “ideals for the development of a community” could “crystallize.” A device was needed to develop “a nucleus of community pride . . . around which may be gathered those forces of rural progress that will tend to give group unity, group ambition.”17 Butterfield analyzed rural society as an integration of social institutions. Rural society thrived when these agencies worked well, and it disintegrated when these institutions were weak or failed to adapt to a modernizing world. Extending his ideas to the world mission field, he wrote for the Jerusalem conference that “efficient local social institutions” were a prerequisite to the “development of the rural community.” This began with the family, which needed to prolong the domestic ideal for women. Woman’s first place in the new Christian social mission and rural-­communitarian “civilization building” was to be a career homemaker who would project “the home into the life of the community.” The school was another important social institution that missionaries needed to consider, and they should attach to their plans for rural schools in the foreign mission field a concern for adult education. “Voluntary farmers’ associations organized for purposes of economic efficiency, for health, for recreation, for sociability” should be started so that rural people could “get the habit of collective action.” “Lack of adequate organization” was, according to Butterfield, “one of the intrinsic weaknesses of farmers.” Finally, religious institutions completed Butterfield’s picture of the institutional scaffolding to build up rural civilization, and he argued that the church needed to study its program, organization, and activities “in light of the peculiar needs of the village and the village people.”18 The Jerusalem meeting featured accounts of missionary rural work already ongoing, and the IMC issued a declaration, “The Christian Mission in Relation to Rural Problems in Asia and Africa.” It adopted many of Butterfield’s categories for rural life and diagnoses of the rural problem for the church. It named “community development” as the framework of social action for missions, positioning

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the church, the school, and the family (the “nursery of Christian character”) as overlapping “agencies for community development” in rural life. Intersecting these in the missionary mapping of modern village geographies were “voluntary organizations, both economic and social, that shall provide for collective effort in the business and social life of the community.” The IMC also called on missionaries to look to government as an ally in the cause of community development: “Wherever governments are endeavouring to lift up the rural life economically and socially they should receive our intelligent, consistent and continuous co-­ operation.”19 Following the Jerusalem meeting, Butterfield toured agricultural mission stations in India and recommended in 1930 that each mission should have a rural reconstruction unit that served five to fifteen villages.20 By the end of the 1930s it was a dominant doctrine among Protestant missions that the expansion of the church hinged on missions becoming a force for rural reconstruction and community development. Cooperatives of various kinds made these abstractions concrete at the 1938 Tambaram, Madras, meeting of the IMC. A special section was convened to discuss the church and the changing social and economic order. The driving force behind it was J. Merle Davis, who was one of the leading missionary voices calling for a harmonizing of the Christian mission with scientific study, especially economics and sociology. Davis—an American Congregationalist born in Japan to missionary parents—headed the IMC’s Department of Social and Industrial Research, the creation of which was an important consequence of the Jerusalem IMC meeting. Under Davis the department had conducted major research projects on the distressed social life of Africans in the Copper Belt of Northern Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo and a study of educational cinema and African responses, the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment (which I discuss later).21 The report of the special section, based partly on research by Christian colleges, was compiled by Davis. It is a testament to the significant space that Christian socialism was able to occupy in international missionary conversations about development at the end of the 1930s.22 Davis decried wealth inequality within societies as well as “the present inequality of economic opportunity open to various nations” and called for a just redistribution of wealth. His was a Christian socialist manifesto urging missions to boldly contend with the ideologies of the day to redefine the economic order. All were implicated in “social sin,” living “by the fruits of an unjust and unchristian social order” while “our lives are so embedded in it that we often fail to recognise our collective selfishness as sin before God.” The Christian mission, Davis argued, should not just be to create social services to ameliorate suffering for “those who are victims of the social order.” Instead, new and old churches should work through Christian-­ communitarian development to usher in a new social and economic order, emphasizing that the “Kingdom of God” was something to come “on earth as it is in heaven.” It was “both present and future; a growth and a final consummation

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by God.” On Earth, the Kingdom of God needed to be an active creation of Christian communities. The church needed to build a new “order of brotherhood where God-­given resources are used to serve all mankind, where co-­operation replaces competition and where special privilege gives place to justice and equal opportunity to all.”23 Actual cooperatives needed to be fitted into Christian community. As Davis put it: “While it is not the rightful function of the Church to commend any particular type of co-­operative organisation for universal adoption, yet it becomes ever more clear that the essential principle of co-­operation will alone answer the collective problems of our national and international life, if that life is to be Christian.”24 Davis also saw a very pragmatic purpose to community development that arose from the precarious relationship between the old churches and young churches at the end of the 1930s. Dwindling financial resources of Western churches, combined with “the growth of nationalism and of forces that consider Christianity a danger to the cultural integrity of the nation,” added up to a situation in which younger churches would have to quickly gain capacity to be “self-­governing, self-­supporting, and self-­propagating.”25 C OM M U N I T Y D EV E L O P M E N T A S P R OJ E C T L E S S O N

Missionaries conveyed community development during the interwar period through variations of the concept of the mission as social action center, deploying agents of rural reconstruction more or less radially. These operated with varying degrees of government collaboration, supervision, and control, and often they had a focus on training mission schoolteachers, who were seen as ideal evangelists for the Christian community development message. In Africa, where missions operated thousands of village schools, this kind of missionary activity had a significant impact on the shape of village education. It addressed adults, too. Missionaries experimented with publicity tools like plays, demonstration plots, and home demonstrations (in, for instance, hygiene and mothercraft) to address illiterate audiences. Missionaries who operated rural reconstruction training centers were aware that their work was contributing to the elaboration of an education-­based model of modernization through community development and cooperatives. They were not just teaching what they saw as better farming methods. They wanted to build systems that could shape character and re-­create the self in the context of the reconstructed village. Missionaries were of course not the only ones to see in cooperatives and community development the mechanisms to shape character in colonial contexts. As we saw in the last chapter, it was common for ICS administrators, like missionaries, to see the problem of development in terms of morality and psychology. F. L. Brayne saw his “ ‘Village Uplift’ ” work in Punjab as indirectly translating Christian prin­ ciples.26 The character-­training features of cooperatives had long been appreciated in the Punjab Cooperative Department, and Strickland promoted this feature

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during his study and advice tours to colonial governments. However, missionary educationists lent to the moral-­disciplinary endeavor the practiced hand of the teacher with an eye on the latest theoretical turns in pedagogical scholarship. Missionary educationists who embraced rural reconstruction in the 1920s and 1930s tended to embrace the “learn by doing” instructional paradigm of American progressive education, shaped especially by philosopher John Dewey. This treated education as an exercise in conducting groups to carry out projects as opposed to didactic classroom instruction. For Dewey and his disciples, the “New Education” could be a powerful force of social reformation by pressing into the character of students, the nation’s future citizens, what was most indispensable in modern social conditions: a “spirit of social cooperation and community life.” When students worked together on constructive projects with tangible results, a positive discipline was exerted over the students that forged their character, habits, and social solidarities.27 Missionaries crafted community development into project lessons. When missions in Africa sent rural reconstruction specialists into villages and among their tasks asked them to start cooperatives, they intended them to be disciplinary spaces to shape character and habits suited for Africa’s new social situation. They thought of this work in terms of adult education. Colonial hierarchies filtered into their project lessons, collecting especially around the representation of Europeans as benevolent teachers who were indispensable to African progress. Missionaries were capable of imagining a hypothetical equality between Europeans and colonial subjects and could even see rural reconstruction work as training the latter in civic capacities for democratic politics, but only after a long span of tutelage. Their lessons frequently represented this longue durée didactic relationship. The internationalism of missions between the wars exposed missionary educationists in Africa to a wider world of colonial mission fields where experiments in rural education were conducted. In some cases American intellectual currents of educational theory and rural economics found their way into missionary social action in Africa through circuitous routes, passing first through missionary experiments in other parts of the British empire, especially India. And throughout the interwar period, as missionaries wove cooperatives into the package of colonial rural development in India and Africa, there was a persistent influence on missionary educationists of the published wisdom of the Punjab cooperatives experts. Take, for instance, the Martandam YMCA Rural Reconstruction Centre in Travancore. It was a celebrated example of the YMCA’s work in India to bring about “rural reconstruction,” a term the organization claimed to have coined.28 The Martandam Centre provided services for “every type of need, spiritual, physical, mental, social and economic,” including cholera and malaria relief, cooperative marketing of eggs, and assistance with developing cottage industries. It offered ten-­week courses on “village organisation and cooperative methods.”29 In the

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words of its director, American rural sociologist Duane Spencer Hatch, the concept was “self-­help with intimate, expert counsel.”30 But here is an important point that brings us back to the influence of the cooperative system building and community development theorizing carried out by the ICS in the preceding decades. Though Hatch was an American, he was not simply carrying an American prescription for the rural problem. Instead, his analysis of the problems of poverty and debt and the importance of cooperative remedies drew from the studies of leading ICS experts on cooperatives and community development, including Brayne and former Punjab Cooperatives Registrar Malcolm Darling.31 Similar internationally entangled strands of rural reconstruction theory and pedagogical practice—with a special place for cooperative societies—were woven into the Moga Training School for Village Teachers in Punjab, run by the American Presbyterian Church mission. American Presbyterians had a presence in India going back to the 1830s, and in the first decades of the twentieth century some of the church’s missionaries (most notably Sam Higginbottom, founder of Allahabad Agricultural Institute in the United Provinces) were model practitioners of a self-­ help-­focused social gospel program that drew inspiration from American ideas about rural modernization theory while also drawing on the expertise of British colonial agricultural science. Moreover, they espoused a vision of the rural problem in India that flowed well with the British colonial order—one that exonerated colonial rulers of blame and insisted instead that rural social ills were the result of character deficiencies plaguing cultivators. Their prescription for development was self-­help, not state-­sponsored campaigns.32 The Moga School in Punjab exemplified this approach to rural uplift. Under its principal from 1914 to 1925, William McKee, the school became famous in international, ecumenical missionary circles for its community development program, which entwined self-­help and character building with programs of practical agricultural demonstration. McKee was a leading voice on rural education at the IMC’s Jerusalem meeting, and the Moga curriculum was admired and in some cases copied by the ICS in training schoolteachers.33 The Moga School also produced its own publication, the Village Teachers’ Journal, to publicize rural reconstruction. But what was most key was that the Moga School brought into a British colonial context and tried to execute in model fashion Dewey’s new education. McKee joined the Presbyterian Church (USA) mission at Moga shortly after completing his undergraduate degree in civil engineering at Cornell University, but he returned to the United States for further training in rural education at Columbia University, where Dewey then taught (though it is not clear whether he took classes with Dewey). According to an account of the Moga School’s history produced by the PCUSA’s Board of Foreign Missions, when he returned to Moga in 1919 McKee turned it into “a rural version of Columbia Teachers’ College, with the ‘project method’ in full operation and up to date devices for teaching reading and other subjects.”34 Moga

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translated cooperatives into project lessons to be enacted in its miniature society. This included simulating a rural system of small plot farmers organized through cooperative marketing. Every student at the laboratory middle school got a small plot of land and was responsible for cultivating a garden. The vegetable garden project hooked into the cooperative vegetable shop project. The students built a small (six-­foot-­square) shop to which they would bring vegetables for sale. They were tasked with looking after inventory, handling money, and keeping accounts. At the end of each month they reported their accounts to the headmaster for checking, and he would tender their monthly dividend on the profits. The point of project-­based learning was that useful lessons would be learned and character developed along with the process of accomplishing the project. Here principles of self-­help and cooperation were the desired character traits. The lesson also developed a familiarity with money and allowed students to practice basic math and bookkeeping. There was even a geography lesson involved, since looking after a shop could stimulate an interest in where commodities were grown and made.35 McKee theorized cooperatives as part of missions. His global summary of rural work and Christian missions for the Jerusalem IMC conference, which he wrote a few years after leaving the Moga School, shows how a missionary educator could see his work with cooperatives as aligning government action with Christian-­communitarian development aims.36 He consulted studies of rural poverty in India, including Darling’s The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt, but he paired his reading of agricultural economics and rural sociology by Darling and others with missionary-­authored texts that tackled problems of rural education. He quoted Higginbottom: “ ‘Anyone familiar with rural India knows that Christianity has no greater handmaid than the cooperative society. There is not one teaching in these societies that does not come from the teaching of Jesus: mutual help, goodwill, trust, absence of suspicion.’ ” But cooperatives alone could not incite a mass spiritual conversion. While McKee praised the work of the ICS in trying to organize cooperatives to rescue Indian peasants from the money­lenders, he stressed the argument of K. T. Paul, Indian national general secretary of the YMCA, that “government work needs to be supplemented by Christian effort, since credit is really dependent on character.”37 The suggestion was that character was the domain of the missionary teacher. In Africa the social action centers of missions similarly threaded American rural economics with cooperative expertise from India. They also drew freely from intellectual currents about racially adapted education associated with the US South (as is seen in the profound influence of the writings of Thomas Jesse Jones). It was common for British missionary or government educators to tour Black agricultural and industrial colleges in the US South, especially Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, in preparation for rural reconstruction work in Africa.

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An important example is German agricultural missionary Bernard Huss from the Mariannhill Native Training College in Natal, South Africa. Huss was one of the earliest and most well-­known missionary promoters of cooperatives in Africa in the interwar period. Through traveling lectures and other forms of publicity, Huss tried to organize credit cooperatives on the Transkei reserve. In addition to leading the Marianhill teacher training college, he also ran the Catholic African Union, which was a “conservative, missionary-­controlled movement” intended to counter the influence in South Africa of “Garveyite ideas of black collective self-­ assertion in opposition to the influence of the white missions.” Huss published articles on cooperatives in the CAU’s journal Um Afrika, to which all African Catholic mission teachers were required to subscribe. Huss, like many of his Protestant missionary counterparts, saw cooperatives in terms of a Christian welfare mission. They were “an essential tool for missionaries engaged in welfare work requiring them to ‘go to the poor.’ ”38 He was convinced that the cultural building blocks for a successful cooperative movement were already latent in African societies despite recent ruptures of social change. There were “old Bantu elements,” he believed, that formed the “wild stock on which modern co-­operation is to be grafted: solidarity, self-­sacrifice, social equality, collective liability, self-­control, publicity, strict supervision, settlement of disputes, and gratuitous service.”39 Yet while he thought Africans possessed “splendid natural equipment for co-­ operation,” they still had to pass “the great moral test, which is indispensable for reaping the fruits of genuine co-­operation.” What needed to be shaped into character was “absolute honesty, perfect reliability, unimpeachable integrity, unshakable loyalty, patience, and perseverance.” As a disciplinary space, cooperatives could produce paragons of the regenerated Christian self. In a thriving People’s Bank, members talked not only about money but also about “better persons, better hearts.”40 As a Roman Catholic, Huss operated outside the orbit of Oldham’s Protestant-­ only IMC, but he was nonetheless connected to the international missionary networks that were pushing the new community-­development-­focused rural mission. His work was followed with interest by Protestant missionaries and others engaged in community development education work, including Oldham. In 1930, following a personal suggestion from Butterfield, Huss secured a Carnegie grant to study “the economic conditions among the Negroes in the United States” in order to find lessons that could help to solve the “immediately arising problem of agricultural credit” for Africans in South Africa.41 During Huss’s trip he was impressed by the new program underway by the Federal Farm Bureau to lend money to farmers through cooperative societies.42 But even as he studied American strategies of rural development, Huss, like McKee, was versed in the cooperative work of the ICS, and he corresponded with Strickland about his Transkei plans. Strickland was keenly interested in Huss’s efforts, but he was critical of Huss

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for trying to grow the movement too quickly through his own propaganda before making sure that a trained cooperative organizer was recruited. Huss wanted the South African government to do more to support cooperative development on the reserves, but his lobbying efforts were largely unsuccessful, and this was in part because of white commercial opposition.43 Huss’s efforts, though he was not particularly successful in kicking off a Raiffeisen movement in Transkei, highlight the interwar situation for cooperative development in Africa. Governments were relatively slow to come up with actual advice and publicity schemes. In some places, particularly settler colonies like Huss’s South Africa, there was reluctance even to set up Strickland’s legal framework. This was the case in Kenya as well, where the settler-­dominated Legislative Council copied South Africa’s cooperative law. But at the same time, there was great enthusiasm among missionaries for cooperatives as a hybrid spiritual and economic site of community that could support the work of the church, so they wove cooperatives into their adapted curricula of rural adult education and into the prescribed village uplift activities of teachers trained at their missions. As they installed cooperatives as part of their pedagogy, missionaries hoped for and anticipated that government would promote and organize cooperative development. If this were to be the case, it was important that cooperative development not abandon its potential as a space of spiritual training. There was often overt political intent in missionary rural reconstruction work. Huss was typical of other missionaries in the way he read the ideological dimensions of development in the 1920s and 1930s. “The native mind,” he wrote, sometimes “is a reaction, a revolt, a protest against the European mind.” There were “two main schools of thought in the native mind.” The “school of unrest” was led by “agitators, radicals, [and] fire-­brands,” and the “sources of unrest” were “in the Africans themselves, in the American negroes, especially through Marcus Garvey, and in the Communists.” The school of unrest mocked his cooperative propaganda as nothing more than Europeans seeking to “off-­load our new hobby on the African people.” The “school of adjustment,” on the other hand, was led by “moderate and thinking natives” who believed in “self-­help for their race” but understood their own “inability to carry on without our help.”44 Huss thought that with “race consciousness” rising all over Africa, cooperatives had the potential to provide a field for “[Bantu] self-­expression . . . [and] for practicing organization and leadership.”45 Missionaries often would mix their colonial anti-­politics with hopes for cooperation’s spiritual and character-­building properties. Armed with the latest American and ICS rural economics, they preached cooperatives as part of their new social gospel mission to develop rural communities tethered internally by vibrant self-­help institutions. Meanwhile, in their community development lessons they scripted an unending didactic relationship between Africans and Europeans for what was expected to be a

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long evolution of social progress (and afterward, presumably, international Christian cooperative harmony). As they explored media and rhetorical forms through which to present the cooperative and other modes of community development to “the African mind,” missionaries were motivated by hopes for the mass spiritual conversion that an expansive system of rural reconstruction could affect. They also were alert to the potential of African politics to disrupt their plans, and they were concerned that their spaces of mental, moral, and cultural training could be host to politically subversive ideas. D EV E L O P M E N T B Y D I S C I P L E SH I P

The most significant mission-­government collaboration in community development in interwar British Africa was the Jeanes school system. The flagship center was opened at Kabete, Kenya, outside Nairobi in 1925, and it inspired numerous replicas elsewhere in British Africa and the West Indies. The Jeanes system, like the Moga School and Huss’s Mariannhill school, married the social action center to the teacher training college. It aimed to set off a community development movement centered on the village mission school and cooperatives of various kinds. All the Jeanes schools in the British empire were started with funds from the Car­ negie Corporation, and Oldham was one of those who had lobbied Keppel for the original grant for educational projects in Kenya that funded the Kabete school.46 The Jeanes system was one of the most talked-­about convergence points of missionary and government initiative in adapted education systems building. The training centers were encouraged by the Colonial Office, and they worked in coordination with colonial education departments. It was in many ways the brainchild of the Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies (ACEC) and represented the Colonial Office’s new, post–Phelps-­Stokes turn in British colonial education policy; it registered the influence of US southern industrial and agricultural education. It was, in fact, meant to be a loose adaptation of the system of traveling rural ­teachers in the South sponsored by the philanthropic Anna T. Jeanes fund. Technically the Kabete center was a government school, but it worked hand in hand with missions. It was run for its first six years by Church of Scotland missionary J. W. C. Dougall, who had been the secretary of the Phelps-­Stokes East African Commission and was well-­known to Oldham and others on the ACEC. Dougall was just shy of thirty when he took his post at the Jeanes school. He had felt the call to missions since before the war, when he was inspired by the 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference and the Student Volunteer Movement.47 Before taking his position at the Jeanes school he toured schools and universities for African Americans in the United States, and he also was versed in the Moga model of community development and teacher training. His contact in the Kenya Department of Education, Evan Biss, encouraged him to think of his

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work as the development of the Moga concept “in African conditions.”48 Dougall continued to track the progress of Moga for years. In keeping with intellectual currents in the ecumenical world missions movement, he admired how Moga formed around the principle of “the economic basis of the church’s life and the need for a unified and comprehensive understanding of the community, material and spiritual.”49 The influence of missionary currents of development thought and Christian rural sociology on the Jeanes system cannot be overstated. This went beyond the Kabete original. The Jeanes school in Nyasaland operated on similar lines to Dougall’s school. Ernest Bowman, the Nyasaland school’s principal, had a long background as a Church of Scotland missionary in the Protectorate before taking his post and starting the school in 1929. His thinking about community development was shaped by the adapted education projects he copied from the Kabete Jeanes campus, which he had visited. He, like Dougall, had taken a Phelps-­Stokes tour of the southern United States.50 Bowman also closely followed the missionary discussions and theological debates about the church’s social role and its rural mission. He placed great importance on the IMC conferences and hoped to implement principles that emerged from them. He cited the community development statement from the 1928 IMC conference in Jerusalem as a form of marching order “to shape the work of evangelism, education, economics, healing, and hygiene in the village not on a crude simple form of city work, but on a radically different plan from the foundation upward.” He was able to translate the work done at his Jeanes campus in terms taken from Butterfield’s latest prescriptions of a rural sociology for missions.51 The Jeanes collaboration between government and missions went beyond having missionaries run some of the training schools. As a system of village school supervision, the Jeanes system worked within the mission education structure that was already in place in Africa, and it tried to put into practice ideas of Christian rural sociology that saw the mission school as key to new crystallizations of community. The Kenya flagship campus was the model for this. The forms of community development shaped there were to be relayed outward from the Kabete hub of agricultural and pedagogical expertise through existing mission circuits. The school trained men and women specialists in a European-­recommended practical science of hygiene, home economics, mother-­craft, and agricultural economics (which was the domain of knowledge that included all aspects of cooperation). The address to women and their enlistment as welfare instructors was not incidental; rather, it reflected the growing consensus among experts, particularly those whose views were gaining traction in the Colonial Office, that women were “central to welfare and development.”52 It also was in line with Butterfield’s rural sociology that saw the home under a Christian woman’s supervision as a cardinal institution of rural civilization. Upon completion of training, these specialists would be attached to missions of multiple Christian denominations (including Roman

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Catholic), spread out through much of Kenya but focused particularly on Kikuyu, Nyanza, and Ukamba, which all were areas significantly affected by the recent history of European settlement. Embarking from their base at the mission, the Jeanes teacher and his wife would travel over a circuit of remote village schools, instructing the local mission schoolteachers, as well as adults willing to listen, in a variety of community development, health, and hygiene activities. It was development publicity by discipleship. And again, though it was a government school, Dougall and other European staff at the school at the main training center never took their eye off the moral, religious aims of community development. The key to the Jeanes training center in Kabete was that the campus, like the Moga School, was itself the simulation of the ideal modern village its creators hoped to replicate everywhere the Jeanes teachers went. As a miniature society, the Jeanes campus modeled the political geography of interwar colonial community development. It was designed to be a “cooperative rural community,” structuring daily life around village betterment activities that were supposed to course with the spirit of self-­help while still maintaining a structure of European oversight, with a European principal in charge of a staff of Africans and Europeans.53 The campus layered cooperative forms of labor, savings and lending, purchasing, and insurance. In 1936 the Kabete Jeanes campus had a cooperative shop with seventy members sharing a year’s profit of Shs 386. There was also a cooperative bank that in the same year had lent money for purchases of “some dozen bicycles, 4 ploughs, [and] pieces of land.”54 The cooperative bank also held the funds of the cooperative Jeanes teachers’ widows and orphans life insurance fund.55 The Jeanes program was part teacher training and part psychological study. European staff recorded their observations about how Africans received community development instruction in order to refine their pedagogical approach. Psychology in the British empire, as one historian notes, provided a new domain of colonial technopolitics, “opening up new possibilities for imperial power.” And yet the “science of mind” could be subversive by challenging colonial categories of racial difference with counterarguments about universal mental capacities or by insisting that the difference-­making power was in “social environments and cultural contexts” rather than race.56 Dougall’s position on theoretical debates on the question of psychological difference between Africans and “civilized man” was that differences in modes of thought were produced by differences in social systems (one was more advanced than the other). Africans were educable, but their minds were childlike. His views echoed the ideas of recapitulation theory that had been held by some of the leading theorists of education and child psychology, including Dewey and other proponents of the new education. The theory held that “development of the individual retraced the cultural history of the human race and that non-­White cultural groups represented an earlier, inferior, and childlike status.”57 But Dougall also drew from the avant-­garde of psychoanalysis the idea

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that all minds were shaped by a “primary and fundamental” mode of thought that is “unconscious, pre-­logical, mystical, and egocentric” and a secondary mode that is “logical, conscious, and objective.” These two modes, he thought, were always in changing ratio with each other, but the “white man’s mind” was shaped from childhood within social systems with “a heritage of knowledge of a scientific character” that tended to augment the secondary, logical, conscious mode of thought. Social tradition in a “primitive community,” by contrast, shared “the characteristics of the individual’s own pre-­logical mode of thought” and reinforced “the mental attitudes and assumptions which are of the essence of the unconscious in us all, civilized and uncivilized alike.”58 Dougall argued (clearly influenced by Freud) that effective African education needed to help along the process of “canalizing or sublimating the emotional energies of the unconscious” by giving them “their necessary freedom and expression, both through aesthetic and artistic channels such as games, dancing, singing, arts, and handicrafts,” as well as through religious faith.59 The Jeanes directors were preoccupied with the idea of how to mediate the values of rural reconstruction to African minds shaped differently by African social systems, and they entrenched principles of adapted education in their curriculum. An adapted math problem recommended by Bowman at the Nyasaland school illustrates this well: “Instead of a problem about the profit on so many pianos bought at £55, 6s. 11d., and sold at £60, try one on the monetary loss to a village with thirty-­six adult males, who have put off paying their 6s. poll-­tax till beyond the time limit, and so must pay 9s. each. The latter problem is good arithmetic, civics, and economics; the former can have no interest for an African villager of the present generation.”60 This problem is revealing of the kind of communitarian-­modern subject missionaries hoped to shape in Africa through the pedagogies of community development. The piano example was first of all disqualified on the grounds of being alien to the environment of Africa and therefore inconsistent with the principles of adapted education. But the civics lesson of the problem was equally as important as the math and was about the proper orientation of the African self to community. The lack of money discipline and lack of attentiveness to the civic responsibilities demanded by the British government did not just hurt the individual; it held back the development of the entire community. The piano seller is taken for granted as relating to money in terms of his own cost and benefit, but this was an unimaginable economic subject for a modern African, rooted in a village unit, whose self-­interest could not be untangled from the needs of the village. While the Jeanes system stressed the importance of communities looking inward—planting community gardens or volunteering labor to build schools, community halls, or cooperative shops—at the same time it presented its idealized village as a space intersected by markets, money, and commodities.61 One geography lesson

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developed at the Jeanes center in Nyasaland had schoolchildren form a human train in imitation of the train that would bring export crops from Blantyre to the Zambezi to be shipped. The child leading the train would hoot the sound of a whistle as the children stopped to pick up “small bales of tobacco and cotton and a box of tea at appropriate stations en route.”62 This placing of students within chronotopes of moving agricultural commodities through the world was a common instructional device and was carried down to village schools through Jeanes teachers on their supervisory circuit. In Kenya, one geography lesson used a bicycle pump, a pale of water, and a small gourd to simulate a ship carrying sugar from India and caught in a monsoon.63 One idea discussed at a Jeanes refresher training day for teachers in the field in 1938 was to use district-­level statistics on agricultural exports as material in Standard II and III geography lessons.64 Dougall and other staff at the Jeanes school, particularly the agricultural instructor Selwood Walford, experimented with the pedagogies of cooperation. They were interested in discovering both how to best teach cooperatives and what else, beyond the principles of cooperation themselves, the cooperative (as project lesson) could teach. In Dougall’s formulation of the problem, an understanding of the benefits of membership in a cooperative was a logical comprehension—a kind of mental calculation that was supposed to be difficult for Africans. It involved connecting cause to effect, of associating projected benefits with underlying principles of cooperative organization. One technique was to turn the lesson into drama. The Jeanes school under Dougall put on a play in the school hall to teach “the advantages of buying goods at the school co-­operative shop as compared with the Indian bazaar.” It contrasted the purported benefits of European-­guided cooperative economics with a caricature of Indian retail traders who provided the main link to consumer goods for Africans. The contrast was staged by showing “the neatness, cleanness, and cheap prices of the model shop; and the disorder and fraud of the other.” The final act had a purchaser buy a blanket at an Indian bazaar “only to find that he has been badly cheated, for the blanket turns out to have a large hole in it.” The reaction of one student who watched the play was taken by Dougall as a lesson in how in the African mind “the logic [of] emotions succeeds where the logic of conscious reason fails”: The student went to Nairobi two days after seeing this play, and, seeing an attractive blanket in the Indian bazaar, he bought one for five shillings. When he got home and untied his parcel he found that the blanket was old and worn and had a hole in the corner! He was so much impressed that he came to tell me about it even at the risk of being the object of some merriment. It would be absurd to say that he was “impervious to experience.” He had been impervious to the logic of the lesson and the play, but now he would buy all his blankets at the school. The danger now would be that the experience: “My Indian blanket had a hole in it” would become the general rule: “All Indian blankets have holes in them.”65

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By focusing on the uncanny hole in the Indian blankets, Dougall was convinced that the student had missed the key economic lesson about the cooperative: that somehow it guaranteed quality (presumably on the premise that the mutual interest of cooperative members, who were also consumers of the goods in the shop, would make them want to maximize quality). It was not just the blankets in Indian shops that were inferior, but rather everything in the Indian shop so long as that shop was not a cooperative. In the pedagogical design of the Kabete campus, the cooperative shop was for the resident adult Jeanes teachers in training what the laboratory school was for their children who resided with them on campus. Both laboratory school and model co-­op shop were part of installing the mechanics of Dewey’s new education at the heart of the village. First of all, cooperatives were supposed to develop market and money fluency for adults. According to Dougall, it was not that Africans did not have experience with “trading and money transactions,” but rather that their experience had been negatively shaped by the example of Indian ­traders “and from such Africans as have started business with the intention of making a fortune in a year or two without any consideration for the public.” Dougall wrote to friends that the cooperative shop on campus “teaches cash-­ payments on which we are adamant, and both to the teachers serving in the shop, and to the other ‘share-­holders’ who are initiated from time to time, it teaches the mysteries and necessities of careful receipts, account books, ledger, and balancing the till.”66 The shop might have allowed its members to purchase on lines of credit, but this was thought to be too risky for Africans. In 1932, shortly after Dougall left the school and T. G. Benson took over as principal, the cooperative shop started allowing Europeans to join. Benson reflected in the school’s annual report that year that four Europeans had joined, but their purchases were not substantial because they were deterred by the cash-­only policy. It was a dilemma born of the principles of paternal trusteeship: “To allow credit to Europeans and not to Native members would be contrary to the spirit of Co-­operation and to allow credit to the African members would be unwise, and directly opposed to the educational aim of the shop.” As project lesson, the cooperative also was a space of moral and civic education in the Jeanes model village. The assumption was that the character of adult African students as much as children needed to be trained through habit. The cooperative shop could accomplish this, shaping into the character of cooperative members values of group loyalty, honesty, and thrift. Multiple forms of contractual and social discipline worked through these model cooperatives in service of moral lessons. One “insidious” problem identified by the Jeanes staff was stock pilfering by co-­op shop clerks. The most difficult part of the problem was detection. The shopkeeper, as sole attendant of the shop, could not easily be caught in the act of pilfering, since this could only come to light through counting stock. As with all things at the Jeanes school, the problem

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needed experimentation. What needed to be discovered in the context of the Jeanes laboratory co-­op was exactly what margin of error could be expected when the shopkeeper’s tasks dealt with measuring and weighing small quantities. It was implicitly a question about the African mind and ability.67 Examples were made of clerks who lost too much stock and were thus determined to be stealing. In 1936 the co-­op shop salesman did not receive his 5 percent dividend “owing to loss on stock” during the year.68 Another salesman was jailed for stealing from the store’s stock. The story was distributed to Jeanes teachers in the field in the pages of the school’s bulletin, Moto Mmoja (Swahili for The one fire), as a “salutary lesson to pilferers.”69 It would appear that this was a suggestion to Jeanes teachers in the field that they share the sobering news with shopkeepers and other members of the cooperatives that they had started and advised during their village visitations. The ventures in cooperative savings and lending on the Kabete campus also had a disciplinary edge in dealing with members who were not meeting their side of the cooperative contract. In one issue of Moto Mmoja, teachers in the field received a warning that defaulters from the Kabete campus’s investment and loan society would have their names published: “They have proved themselves unworthy of confidence. To add insult to injury some refuse even to answer letters from the committee who run the bank. Your duty is to answer letters at once [emphasis in original].”70 The principle of community financing of development was key to the activities of Jeanes teachers in the field. On their circuits they emphasized the importance of student fees for the health of the village school. They created single-­purpose cooperative ventures for specific development tasks, like combining resources for the purchase of a new plow. The most common form of cooperation initiated by Jeanes teachers in the field was the co-­op shop. Just as either the European principal or the agricultural instructor at the Kabete campus sat as chair of the cooperative committee for the shop on campus, in the field the Jeanes teacher was encouraged to take on this role. In Benson’s circular to all Jeanes teachers in the field in March 1933, he highlighted the good work of one Jeanes teacher, Aaron Kivuva, who had led people in Kangundo near Machakos in Ukamba Province in building a “brick and iron” cooperative shop that was already producing a profit for its members. The bricks were most likely made by the cooperative members themselves, since brickmaking was a community skill taught at Jeanes, as it was at Moga. The Kenya governor visited while on safari and officially opened the shop.71 Several years after the shop was opened, it was singled out by Benson as the most successful of the Jeanes-­supervised shops, with sixty-­two members and Shs. 1,602 in capital, and paying 5 percent dividends to shareholders and 8 percent dividends on purchases.72 In 1938 Benson thought another newly started cooperative shop, with eighty members and Shs. 500 in capital, deserved “investigation and encouragement, if possible, by Government officials on safari.” This one

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was started by Samson Kipsamech at Chebwagan in the Kipsigis area near Litein, Nyanza Province. Samson and his wife Alice were attached to the nearby Africa Inland Mission station. The shop was especially valuable in Benson’s view “since there are no other shops in the neighborhood except those of the Indian traders at Litein.”73 This underscored the view of the Jeanes school supervisors that African cooperatives were valuable as a force of liberation from the influence and exploitation of Indian traders. People’s banks were encouraged by the Jeanes school’s resident instructor of agriculture and agricultural science, Arthur Selwood Walford, but staff found little evidence that they were being widely adopted, and those that had formed were started by teachers.74 Walford came to the Jeanes school in 1928 from the School of Rural Economy at Oxford.75 On one level Walford saw the work of the Jeanes school as responding to immediate, critical needs for social welfare. He wanted to find “acceptable ways and means to overcome basic poverty, and ill-­health especially of the infants and mothers and to make the best use of what was available in the form of timber for building and furniture clay for bricks and the land for produce to eat.”76 He saw people’s banks similarly as a savings mechanism for rural Africans who could not typically afford the minimum deposits at large mutual assurance societies.77 Walford was an enthusiast for all kinds of cooperation. His vision matched Strickland’s. Government, Walford argued, should encourage the formation of African marketing societies, not least because this would organize farmers into groups that were natural audiences for government propaganda (and society members would be the early adopters of the latest government-­sanctioned seed to improve crops).78 More than anyone else at the Jeanes school, it was Walford who theorized how the work of the school and mission education could fit with potential actions of government to develop African society with cooperatives. As much as he was interested in material uplift, he also was interested in the “ ‘spiritual’ side of co-­operation”—the character-­shaping work that was carried out among members by virtue of practicing the disciplinary routines involved in the day-­ to-­day activities of cooperation. He held up the example of Aaron Kivuva’s shop in Ukamba, where the government had imposed licenses on sellers and buyers of sugar in order to stamp out the “vicious habit of the Akamba of using sugar for beer and drinking to excess.” The co-­op shop was likely to get government approval to sell sugar to its members, who had promised “individually and collectively” not to use sugar bought at the store for brewing. Walford was sure that the “force of public opinion within the society” would keep the sixty members of the society united “in the cause of temperance.” In missionary propaganda, though, he thought the spiritual advantages of cooperatives should be hidden, as an aspect of cooperative development to be appreciated, at least initially, only by the teachers, experts, and officials supervising African uplift. Instead, what should be out front was something tangible around which group loyalty could form.79

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In 1932 Kenya’s Agricultural Department sent six African men to the Jeanes school in Kabete to receive special training related to agricultural marketing. Jeanes teachers in Kenya did not as a rule start marketing cooperatives to collect, bulk, and sell crops. This was because “cooperative marketing is organised by experts and carefully controlled.”80 Of course of all types of cooperation in Kenya, as elsewhere in East Africa, it was marketing cooperatives that would have hit closest to the center of the colony’s base of agricultural production. There was, after all, such extreme settler colonial power exerted over marketing law (driven from fear of competition and a depleted labor supply) that Africans were prohibited from growing and selling the colony’s most important export crops. Recall as well that the Colonial Office at the start of the 1930s was advising the Kenya government not to register any cooperatives under its unreformed cooperative law, designed for large settler cooperatives and not including the control and outreach system that Strickland insisted needed to be in place (see chapter 1). The six men sent over by the Agricultural Department were to be trained, but exactly how or why was not specified by the department. Jeanes school staff were only told that the state had just constructed godowns in the Kikuyu area, and that these men were to work at them in some kind of demonstration role. Officials thought courses at the Jeanes school would somehow benefit the men, particularly training in practical pedagogical technique and “how to work out and follow up a scheme of instruction in some aspect of better agriculture.” Such vague parameters left Walford free to imagine how the ICS model of cooperation that he admired could be paired with missionary and government oversight to organize African marketing throughout the colony to achieve material and spiritual gains on a mass scale. He started to train the men as if Strickland’s legal and administrative framework were already in place in Kenya and as if these men were about to become the first personnel of a new rural cooperative extension service and inspectorate: Where there are Godowns they would make their headquarters there. Where there are none they would be at markets or other centres where they would come into contact with sellers. They might move from one market to another, or one store to another as a Jeanes Teacher travels from school to school. At each centre they would give practical demonstrations, of cleaning and grading, if possible using simple machinery. This would probably arouse the people’s curiosity and make them more ready to listen to what the Demonstrator had to say about Co-­operation for the purpose of acquiring a machine like the one he had been using. He should then try to start a society, getting all the help possible from Jeanes Teachers, intelligent school masters, headmen, etc., but keeping the numbers at first small. The society should have a definite object in view, other than simply “helping market food.”81

If they were to succeed as a marketing system, cooperatives had to work on the spiritual side of village life to construct real and lasting community: “If the process

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is hurried and big societies are formed they will have no spirit of unity and no mutual trust. The members will have no sense of loyalty to the society. They will look on it not as their society, but as an organization of the Government, and as such to be exploited as much as possible. But once a few genuine small societies are formed, there will be a snowball effect and the societies will grow in size and new ones will be formed.”82 Walford shared this slow-­growth philosophy with Strickland, but as we will see in the example of post–World War II Uganda, it was an orthodoxy that African farmers defied when they joined cooperatives that were deliberately scaling up quickly to become major centers of nationalist organization. This is not to say that Walford wanted individual societies to be in isolation. Indeed, he thought that cooperation was only useful as a program of rural development if eventually the small societies federated with each other for the purpose of export. Here is his description of the ideal government marketing system, which fittingly (since cooperatives were always conceived as a space of adult education) resembled the colony’s village school supervisory system: But although the individual society must be small[,] societies themselves can recombine or federate into larger societies, and these again can recombine with others, so forming a network of societies centering on a Godown, through which all produce will be sold. The way the country would be divided up can be compared with the sectorization which has been brought into being for schools. The area served by a small society. The B. school or sector school would represent a federation of perhaps 5 or 6 small societies—a sort of central point where the produce of the individual societies could be collected and perhaps re-­bulked. The central Schools represent the station Godown where the produce is finally sold, either by auction or to a licensed buyer as at present.83

The Jeanes school entered the scene in Africa in the midst of looming questions about the relationship of missions to the aims of the colonial state and amid significant African political movements calling into question the development aims of each. For Dougall, the ideological questions of education systems building in Africa were complex. There was clearly a tension between the spiritual aims of missions and the secular aims of the imperial state. At the Jeanes school Dougall was at the helm of a project in government-­missionary collaboration in education, and yet he worried about what would happen in the British empire if the social welfare focus of education were to lose its religious anchoring. He was alarmed by the rise of state-­focused ideologies in the 1920s and 1930s. There was clearly a “present tendency everywhere,” he thought, for the state to gain a monopoly over education. This gave states awesome power to fashion their ideal citizens. Russia, Germany, and Japan revealed the totalitarian dark side of this new development. Dougall read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and thought

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it was a compelling warning about the “new tyranny of the scientifically-­planned society” and wondered whether “in the British Empire we are safe from the ravages of such a philosophy.” The 1925 ACEC White Paper on education in Africa that formalized government’s move into overseeing adapted education reassured him; after all, it recognized the importance of “religion and character training.” But Dougall’s dystopian nightmare was an education system for Africans in which religion became merely a tool in the functionalist social engineering of indirect rule. It was important that the character-­shaping work of the village school operate on the soul. “Religion is not satisfied with social function, though it has such a function,” he told a group of missionaries, philanthropists, academics, and government officials gathered on the Jeanes campus in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, in 1935 to discuss village education in Africa. Christian schools needed to serve the present age, but they also needed to be in line with a view of religion as proclaiming “that man is more than citizen and more than the object of psychological study.”84 This was an ironic reminder coming from a man who was well-­known in missionary, government, and philanthropic circles for his interest in studying the African mind and who had earlier worked with Keppel to bring a Carnegie-­funded American psychologist to the Kenya Jeanes campus to conduct intelligence testing experiments on African subjects.85 Dougall was also worried, as Huss was in South Africa, about the possibility of the rise of a dangerous African political radicalism. At Hampton in Virginia during his trip to study education in the United States, Dougall encountered what was for him an unsettling political climate among the students. It made him rethink an idea to try to recruit an African American educationist to join him in Kenya. He wrote to Oldham: “After my visit to Hampton, I am less confident about the wisdom of sending over an American Negro to help with the initial stages of the Jeanes work. One can hardly escape the feeling that the younger generation of educated negroes is restive, aggressive and less appreciative of the work of the whites even in such a school as Hampton.”86 These impressions defied the conventional missionary representation of US Black industrial and agricultural colleges, since missionaries tended to stress that students from those colleges were not politically radical and contrasted them to followers of W. E. B. Du Bois.87 Du Bois was the Pan-­Africanist intellectual and cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (who late in life in the early 1960s would join the Communist Party, leave the United States, move to Ghana at the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah, and die there).88 Despite the missionary representations of them, schools like Hampton and Tuskegee were indeed significant spaces for discussion of radical Black politics and political contact points for Black internationalism. Harry Thuku, the leader of Kenya’s East African Association, seems likely to have encountered Black American literature for the first time through a circuitous route that started with the president of Tuskegee, Robert Moton,

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sending publications such as the New York Age and Du Bois’s Crisis to members of the Young Baganda Association in Uganda whom Thuku knew. Marcus Garvey’s Negro World also circulated among mission-­educated Africans. In Uganda, Governor Robert Coryndon was so concerned about the growing interest among sons of chiefs in going to the United States for education, and the consequent likelihood that they would be radicalized by “ ‘leaders of Negro Aspirations in the Southern States,’ ” that he successfully petitioned authorities in London to allow him to refuse passports to Ugandans attempting to travel to the US South.89 In some places the Jeanes system catalyzed resistance to government and missions and sharpened political critique of the ways colonial rule was exercised through British schemes of community development. This was especially true on Kikuyu reserves closer to the epicenter of European settlement and the heart of colonial government. Soon after the founding of the Jeanes school at Kabete and in the wake of the Harry Thuku movement, a movement rose briefly in the late 1920s in Nyeri District to tear down gardens whose cultivation was overseen by Jeanes teachers attached to the Church of Scotland mission at Tumutumu. Missionaries attributed the actions to Nairobi-­based agitators connected to ‘the worldwide Bolshevik movement.” The reality was that on one level these actions were about hostility to the principle of European land possession, as the gardens cultivated at these village schools sent their produce back to the mission. The Kikuyu Central Association protested on these grounds and rallied people against the gardens and in defense of Kikuyu land rights. But the situation was more complex, in that sometimes the uprooters of gardens were family members of the Kikuyu landholders who allowed them to be planted on their land. In these cases the controversy was not about nationalist politics but rather about very local conflicts over “who, exactly, controlled family land.”90 While there was consistent enthusiasm for the Jeanes idea in the Colonial Office and among the internationally connected missionary development thinkers, the system did not fit easily within the existing structures of British colonial rule and met resistance from some quarters of administration and missions. In Nyasaland a government review in 1944 found that community workers trained in a special course at Jeanes were “ ‘disheartened and disgruntled,’ ” and that significant conflict was generated between community workers and village headmen.91 In Zanzibar, a plan to start a Jeanes school already had Carnegie support before “objections from elite Arabs stopped the program in its tracks.”92 Jeanes teachers trained to work on reserves in settler-­dominated Southern Rhodesia were controversial among colonial authorities. Officials in the colony’s Native Development Department were enthusiastic supporters of the system, but officials in the Native Department who governed the reserves through a hierarchy of authority descending locally from the native commissioner downward through “ ‘traditional’ elders, headmen and chiefs” were wary of the autonomy of the traveling Jeanes teachers,

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who might gain influence in communities and potentially undermine colonial order. As one chief native commissioner put the problem in 1934: “ ‘Experience has shown that Natives, when clothed with any sort of authority, nearly always abuse it, unless they are kept under the closest supervision, which is not possible in the case of a Jeanes teacher.’ ”93 By the mid-­1930s in Kenya the Jeanes system, according to Joanna Lewis, “had pushed the flimsy structure of collaboration between missions and government to breaking point.” Missionaries thought the teachers were “too secular and blamed them for a decline in spiritual growth.” One in five Jeanes-­trained teachers did not return to their districts and instead went into other work. Only eight hundred of the colony’s three thousand village schools were assisted by Jeanes teachers.94 In some areas officials believed Jeanes teachers were radicals stirring up anticolonial sentiment. The district commissioner of North Kavirondo in Nyanza Province in western Kenya complained that “the Jeanes Teachers in his district are mainly anti-­ Government agitators and are a menace unretrieved by any compensating advantage.”95 Two years earlier the district commissioner from the same district had complained about one teacher, Nikodemo Murunga, who was “stirring up political trouble at his home.”96 Murunga worked under the aegis of the Anglican Church Mission Society (CMS) mission run by Archdeacon W. E. Owen, which was the “dominant mission” in the province. Owen had founded the Kavirondo Tax­payers Welfare Association (KTWA). Like Huss’s Catholic African Union in South Africa, it focused on social uplift, “concentrating heavily on welfare measures, the stimulation of economic growth, and cooperating with the Provincial Administration to ensure ‘good government.’ ”97 Jeanes principal Benson offered no defense for the accused teacher from Owen’s mission: “I do not think very much of him anyhow, nor does Archdeacon Owen but he has no other man available to put in that isolated area.”98 This was 1937, and it is not clear in what particular political acts Murunga was believed to be involved. However, the preceding years had been a time of growing concern among Luo and Luhya people in this area about a range of issues, including anti-­African marketing restrictions and the possibility that land could be lost to Europeans. The discovery of gold at Kakamega in 1931 caused worry particularly among Luhya residents about land dispossession to European mining speculators.99 In 1934 two Jeanes teachers in the area, Lazara Afayi and Nathan Mbuabi, were accused of being leaders of an anti-­government, anti-­mining faction. A tense moment occurred at a baraza attended by the governor when Afayi reportedly made “very offensive remarks,” and the governor ordered him to sit down. At a different public meeting, Afayi reportedly challenged the warden of mines to say how the government would respond “if the natives make war on the Miners.” Jeanes principal Benson apparently cautioned the two teachers about their political activities.100 The local movement against mining led to the creation of the North Kavirondo Central Association, which allied with the Kikuyu Central Association.

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After World War II both groups would become part of the Kenya African Union, the major political organization for the anti-­colonial struggle.101 The Second World War brought major changes in the organization and personnel of development work in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa. The influence of missions receded as new “technologized professions directed by the state” were put to the project of colonial development; it was a moment, too, of recognition that the British state should be involved in facilitating and funding colonial development (as evidenced by the 1940 Colonial Development and Welfare Act).102 As we will see in the next chapter, the wartime and postwar transformations of the colonial state as it addressed rural development spelled a dramatic expansion in state-­ driven cooperatives extension work in British Africa. The changes were felt at the Jeanes school. Walford became principal in 1939, and during the war the school was a military training center and a base of operations for the government’s public information work.103 After the war it would become a “permanent training centre for African civil servants” (particularly for training ex-­askari soldiers and their wives) and “headquarters for a Commissioner for Community Development, the Registrar of Co-­operative Societies and an Information Office.”104 This meant that the purpose toward which Walford had bent the school when coming up with a training program for the six African workers from the Agricultural Department— that is, the training of state cooperative extension officers—would become one of the more enduring legacies of the school. The Second World War also saw an important transformation in the media of development publicity. Community development now was presented to African audiences through print and through an array of media that “offered a means of jumping the literacy hurdle,” including through film.105 The Colonial Office’s wartime mass education program for Africa is a monument to the new approach. The 1943 report of the Colonial Office’s Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies that initiated the new strategy, Mass Education in African Society, was first of all a vision of community development. It presented mass education as a program that grew from the ACEC’s “nearly twenty years’ ” commitment to treating the “community as a unit to be educated.”106 The advisory committee now advocated for the “ ‘project’ or ‘campaign’ method of mass education” as a formula of community action, which was to start with formal community groups organizing and conducting an assessment of the needs of the community and “estimate of the likely changes to be brought about in the life of the people by educational and welfare activities.”107 Cooperatives and trade unions were intended to be key allies in the cause, to be brought in early during the local planning process. They were thought to be natural agents of mass education, since they depended “for their existence on the initiative and effort and community spirit of their members.” They were framed in the now-­standard functionalist sociological terms as “strong units which can become a community” in places where “old community

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ties have broken down or hardly existed.”108 It followed that cooperatives and trade unions needed to be focal points of development publicity.109 Mass education sought an arsenal of media, including “the Press, pamphlets, posters, cinema, radio and talks.”110 The centerpiece was a mass literacy campaign that demanded an intensification of production of vernacular texts.111 In the ACEC’s communication landscape the media of mass education were supposed to reinforce each other, working in tandem with spatial arrangements that would create audiences to receive and act upon development instruction. Radio’s “full benefit” could only be achieved, in most cases, if it were received by people within “an organised system of listening groups to each of which is supplied all that is requisite in the way of introductory printed material, diagrams and other illustrations.” Cinema, meanwhile, provided the “most popular and most powerful” visual aid and held tremendous potential as a tool of mass education: “It is mobile, it can cater for large audiences, an unlimited number of copies of a film can be produced, and colonial peoples are as much attracted by it as are any others,” though the mass education subcommittee thought there were special pedagogical considerations when projecting to African audiences.112 P R OJ E C T I N G C OM M U N I T Y D EV E L O P M E N T

While the British community development project acquired new media, there was continuity in the message and its framing techniques. The instructional rhetorics of the demonstration plot and the development morality play (of the type put on at the Jeanes schools) were lifted from the context of the interwar, missionary-­government, rural reconstruction publicity. Missionaries themselves helped to drive the transformation in media and the organization of propaganda, which never fully replaced the older mode of rural reconstruction through traveling agents and teachers but instead operated alongside it (though increasingly its operators were trained agents of the state rather than missionaries and their converts).113 As the state stepped into development publicity, with professional operators of mass communication technologies, it drew from the pedagogies and rhetorics of development that mission education had refined between the wars. Community development experts never abandoned the idea that the cooperative was a British-­supervised space for learning and moral training. As much as new media were primarily about representing development as a set of practices, they also focused on representing the didactic colonial relationship (through images of Africans receiving instruction) and on the drama of British-­guided social uplift. Films depicting cooperatives in close relation with advice-­giving colonial experts provided images that were meant to show what the future held by preserving and deepening that didactic relationship. Some of the first films to promote cooperatives to Africans were made by a missionary project fielded in British East and Central Africa by the IMC’s

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Department of Social and Industrial Research (DSIR) under Davis, and thus very much connected to the interwar social gospel turn in missions. These films take us back to where we began this chapter, the coffee slopes of Kilimanjaro. Oldham’s idea had been to start cooperatives and have an expert train them, and to treat this experimentally as a study of “African conditions.” From 1935 to 1936 the DSIR’s Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment (BEKE) shot four films in the Moshi area featuring the Chagga cooperatives that formed the KNCU. The films made at Moshi were part of a larger project that produced thirty-­five films on a range of rural betterment themes that the filmmakers took to locations in East and Central Africa using mobile cinemas.114 The BEKE project was a pioneering film unit in the history of instructional, development-­focused cinema in Africa.115 It had a direct influence on the mass education subcommittee of the ACEC and was one of the only prior studies of cinema in “backward areas” of Africa noted in its report (along with William Sellers’s significant work with health films and mobile cinemas in Nigeria, which had also influenced the BEKE filmmakers).116 The project also had a lingering influence in the colonies in which it shot films and toured with its mobile cinemas. As officials in Kenya began to think about how mobile cinemas could be deployed for rural propaganda, BEKE films formed the stub of the colony’s instructional film collection. Kenya’s Education Department, for instance, ended up with three BEKE projection and sound units (with soundtracks mainly in Kikuyu) and nine BEKE films, including one of the films shot at Moshi featuring the KNCU.117 The Jeanes school at Kabete also inherited a BEKE projector and possibly a number of BEKE films.118 The BEKE project was deployed to investigate and make recommendations for how a system of mobile cinemas could be used in rural areas of British Africa. It was born out of the DSIR’s 1932 study of industrial conditions on the Central African Copper Belt and the effects on rural society in the region caused by labor migration to the mines. Davis became convinced during this study that films could be a useful tool to help stabilize African society.119 He got “friendly assistance” for the project from the Colonial Office and the British Film Institute, and he found funding for the project from the Carnegie Corporation, which had also sponsored DSIR’s Copper Belt study, and from several Copper Belt mining companies.120 It was Keppel who initially suggested to Davis that the study should focus on East Africa.121 An advisory council for the BEKE was formed in London that included veterans of colonial government (Lugard was the chair), missionary leaders (including Oldham), and academics. Davis recruited former army officer and Kenyan sisal plantation manager L. A. Notcutt as field director. Notcutt had experimented with showing films to workers on the plantations he managed and made several of his own films with “African subjects and actors.” Davis put G. C. Latham, former director of education for Northern Rhodesia (colonial Zambia), in charge of the educational content of the cinema experiment.122 In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Latham helped to transform the Protectorate’s system

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of “Native Education” along the adapted lines endorsed by the ACEC, which included the establishment of Jeanes schools.123 While government and corporate agencies were connected to the BEKE project, it still was “essentially a missionary undertaking” that proposed “to place a new instrument of education in the hands of the missionary, to adapt it to native mentality and needs and to put it within the reach of the missionary educator.”124 Davis was adamant that its purpose was spiritual. He connected it to the same evangelical strategy that he would give full voice to the next year at the Tambaram IMC meeting. The film experiment was part of “the examination of the whole setting in which the infant Church is growing, the critical appraisal of all the forces—economic, social and political—which condition the life of the Christian community, and the utilization of these forces, where possible, as aids in the task of building the Kingdom of God on earth.”125 The experiment, purposed for a Christian mission, needed to be integrated with “the latest developments of practical anthropology.” Some of Britain’s leading anthropologists were on the BEKE Advisory Council, including C. G. Seligman and Audrey Richards, and anthropologists were invited to comment on script synopses and to watch and critique the films themselves.126 To Davis’s mind there was a natural affinity between the practice of anthropology and the practice of evangelism. As he would later write, Jesus was himself a “practical social anthropologist” who “gained His introduction to anthropology by living for thirty years as a participant in the daily drama and tragedy of His people.”127 Latham and Notcutt set up their editing studio in 1935 in Vugiri, Tanga Province, in northern Tanganyika Territory near the Kenya border. From this base of operations their filming crew of Europeans and Africans (led by Notcutt) shot films in Tanganyika Territory, Kenya, and Uganda. They recruited African actors and directed them in instructional films that depicted lessons in hygiene, cooperative economics, and animal husbandry. The BEKE constructed mobile cinemas that fused a diesel engine with a projector and a screen and toured Tanganyika Territory, Kenya, Uganda, Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland, showing films to audiences that sometimes numbered well over a thousand people. The film­makers took careful notes on the screenings and audience reactions and interviewed audience members to derive guidelines for films for Africans, taking stock of what they saw as idiosyncratic tendencies associated with African perceptions of moving images. In this way the filmmaking project was like the Jeanes school: a projection of expertly crafted lessons in community development that doubled as a psychological study. Indeed, while scheming out the topics of films, Latham met with Dougall, and the two men discussed questions of African psychology. After their conversation Latham wrote in his diary, apparently quoting Dougall: “ ‘Do we know what happens in an African’s mind when he sees a picture?’ ”128 The thematic thread that united the BEKE’s films was “ ‘progress vs. African methods.’ ”129 Films on soil erosion could be cinematic vehicles for depicting the progress of Africans who adopted European agricultural methods.130 Such films

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reinforced the work of government-­operated experimental farms that used demonstration plots to offer visual proof of erosion. Soil Erosion at Machakos (1936), shot at Machakos, Kenya, tried to capture and amplify the rhetorical technique of the agricultural demonstration plot, shooting a colonial agricultural officer using one such plot to demonstrate soil erosion to a group of Africans.131 The filmmakers found soil erosion to be a popular topic with African audiences in Kenya.132 Settler organizing to keep the Kenya highlands a “white reserve” often turned on deploying the propaganda image of dusty, eroded soil as the effect of African misuse.133 It was land alienation to settlers, though, that had produced the situation of overcrowded reserves with depleted soil, and some in the BEKE audiences in Kenya “may have felt a need to grasp at what appeared to be the last remaining straw in the declining reserves.”134 Other BEKE films similarly tried to tie the fate of Africans to advice from the metropole while triangulating the didactic relationship with a third figure, the British consumer. A favorite technique was to use dissolve and fade-­in editing tricks to move the audience back and forth across the colonial divide between shots of African farming and marketing and shots of Europeans depicted as discerning judges of quality. The aim of Agricultural Education at Bukalasa (1936) was to convey the importance of cleaning cotton in order to cater to the preferences of buyers in Britain. It worked through a sequence of shots of first a European teacher at the Bukalasa Agricultural Station in Buganda “examining cotton and finding it dirty” then gathering students together to read them a letter from Liverpool. Next were shots of the Liverpool office “showing the broker deciding that he could not buy some of the Uganda cottons, and that Uganda cotton would have to be graded lower unless it was sold cleaner.” This was followed by a return “back to the pupils listening to the letter being read” and then asking the instructor for help.135 The filmmakers used similar visual rhetorics in Co-­ operatives (1935). This was the first of the four films they shot at Moshi featuring the KNCU, which Latham noted “[had] put 1400 tons of coffee on London market last year.”136 The purpose of the film, to Notcutt, was to “show how by forming co-­ operating societies natives can achieve success otherwise impossible.”137 The film first presented shots of Chagga coffee farmers trying to imitate European coffee farmers but failing for “lack of knowledge of coffee cultivation and disease control.” Then the scene moved to show the Chagga coffee being drunk by Europeans, who then expressed their displeasure with the taste. Next were shots of a Moshi coffee cooperative “showing the developed cooperative movement and some idea of its activities and value.”138 There is nothing in the filmmakers’ notes that records any of the controversy around the KNCU, even though it was made around the same time that protests were increasing against the organization and its close relationship to the chiefs of British indirect rule. The Moshi cooperatives more than anything gave Latham and Notcutt a model example of African farming and marketing in close coordination with British

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agricultural experts. The BEKE filming crew returned to the Chagga cooperatives in 1936 to shoot a series of three films about coffee growing and cooperative marketing. One of these, Coffee Marketing (1936), appears to have been similar to the KNCU film shot the previous year and “showed the details of the marketing method under native management.” Another, Coffee under Banana Shade (1936), was “a perfectly simple instructional film” that showed the method of planting banana trees ahead of coffee trees in order to provide shade. High Yields from Selected Plants (1936) tried to show the superiority of scientifically improved seeds and plants resulting from government-­sponsored agricultural research.139 The film featured the government Coffee Research Station at Lyamungu near Kilimanjaro, where government researchers produced clones of coffee plants while collecting and distributing the resulting seed to Chagga farmers.140 The film included shots of laboratory research, coffee harvesting, pulping, and measuring. It compared high-­yielding plants to low-­yielding plants, using cellophane bags to show the maximized quantity of beans yielded from the government experts’ selection process.141 A similar lesson was framed in Maize Marketing (1936), which was shot in Kenya and was intended to show the path of progress from an unreconstructed, disorderly market to one with government order placed over it. Government-­ supervised marketing of maize was instituted in the colony as part of the Marketing of Native Crops Ordinance of 1935. The ordinance was ostensibly to establish better prices for African maize, but in the long term it worked to fix the price of “native maize” at half the price that settler-­planters received.142 The BEKE film, however, attempted to portray the ordinance and the marketing schemes it produced in a favorable light. The film opened with shots of maize being sold at Karatina Market near Mount Kenya to “wayside buyers, and the cheating that takes place.” The film then moved to shots of an “angry crowd,” upset by the market cheats. These shots were put in sequence with a chief turning to ask for assistance from a government agricultural officer. The officer assured the chief that the government would soon start a maize marketing scheme, with the hope that his people would supply their produce. As in the film on high-­yield coffee plants, the filmmakers focused on how the maize marketing scheme would be a distribution channel for government-­ sanctioned seed to reach African farmers. The farmers would be required to use only the government-­sanctioned seed. The final scenes gave the filmmakers a chance to relate the improved crops to the world of commodities, markets, and consumers beyond Africa through a sequence of shots illustrating the process of grading and selling, then the maize on its way to Mombasa, and then shots of its being shipped by sea (a cinematic representation of essentially the same drama of moving commodities that was plotted into the Blantyre-­Zambezi train lesson played out by students receiving the Nyasaland Jeanes school’s curriculum).143 Latham and Notcutt saw that their work with instructional cinema took place within a troubled ideological field in Africa. Latham believed Africa was at a

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turning point. He wrote about the political situation in an essay on education and indirect rule, published in the journal Africa in 1934, a year before the BEKE project started. Education in the West, he argued, tended to foster a spirit of nationalism, but African education should be organized differently to stress interdependence between Africa and the West. Echoing Huss’s view that the African mind was confronted with the competing “school of unrest” and “school of adjustment,” Latham wrote that Africans “have everything to gain by co-­operating with western nations, provided we pursue an enlightened and liberal policy in regard to them. They have everything to lose if they become imbued with a spirit of hatred and non-­co-­operative nationalism.”144 Latham’s analysis was both an endorsement of the political economy supported by British colonial community development and a recognition that the presentation of British development competed for audiences against other powerful versions of modernization. In such a position of ideological warfare through propaganda, colonial film needed to defend itself against competition. Notcutt believed cinema had “ ‘a constructive potentiality of great importance,’ ” but it also “ ‘easily lends itself to unreality and to destructive moral influence, and might do an infinite amount of harm if exploited by irresponsible persons.’ ”145 Latham and Notcutt thought that it was not enough that a film’s content be instructive in values of community development; to become a self-­sustaining film production and distribution system, the films also had to be popular and potentially profitable. Notcutt and Latham agreed that in a deeper sense social progress in Africa would be the outcome of an education and public information system engineered for persuasive effect and maximum exposure. As they explained, “Just as a single advertisement has only a limited effect, so one or two films will not accomplish much. It is the constant repetition of the subject from different points of view which will ultimately influence the masses.”146 The composite elements of colonial development needed to dominate local African social spaces, using censorship controls and a complex machinery of film distribution to promote its message while hedging out others.147 Clearly African nationalisms and Black internationalism were perceived threats for many missionaries between the wars, but mainly as a challenge of the future. When after World War II political parties and national independence movements rose to contest European imperial regimes, church leaders in metropolitan Britain and missionaries in the field would be caught up in the ideological struggles of decolonization.148 Meanwhile the challenge of world communism that officials and missionaries alike perceived already loomed large between the wars, and after World War II the amorphous threat would narrow into rumors of specific subversive conspiracies. But for the interwar missionary educationists, communist modernization sparked fascination as much as dread. While the BEKE directors worried about the negative influence of Hollywood films in Africa, they were awed by the tremendous propaganda gains of state-­directed instructional

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film campaigns in the Soviet Union and wanted to study them.149 In this they were like the members of the ACEC who were impressed by Soviet successes in mass education.150 Above all the BEKE coordinators knew that they were competing with local knowledge and politics, so they made films that made African farming methods seem backward, like the soil erosion films, or that vilified African healers and rain callers as “witch-doctors.” The object of their film Cattle and Disease (1936) was to connect the problem of diseased cattle (depicted as the “dying herd” of a Maasai cattle owner) to reliance on the witch-doctor and, by contrast, to associate healthy livestock with modern European methods.151 Their film Tax (1935) used shots of precolonial warfare and the violent exaction of tribute in a first reel and in a second reel staged a contrasting sequence of shots depicting the improving purpose of colonial taxes in “examples of . . . medical attention, education, help in time of famine, maintenance of order and peace.”152 Such a film could only have been made in competition with a counternarrative that saw hut taxes and other colonial taxes as unjust. Indeed, Latham and Notcutt were well aware of the high level of popular resistance to colonial taxes and did not often show Tax, apparently owing to criticism of the film.153 Counternarratives to the modernizing promise of colonial administration were made all the more threatening in the context of political movements among Africans that sought to challenge the legitimacy not just of colonial taxes, but of the whole colonial order. Few missionaries, though, saw what was coming after World War II, when the cooperative movement, the prized machinery of British rural technopolitics that they had tried to center in their colonial lessons, would become a critical pressure point in contests of decolonization.

3

Anti-­empire, Development, and Emergency Rule

Members of the illegal Uganda African Farmers Union (UAFU) had to give way to the empty trucks escorted by army troops as they rode up to their cotton storehouses in May 1949.1 For months the Ganda farmers had been spreading the word that members of their cooperative union should hold back their cotton that season from the usual government-­enforced routes of ginning and selling to Indians and Europeans. The farmers were unified in their grievances against what they believed was a racist political and economic order held in place by British rule. They hoped the boycott would force the government to change its marketing laws and concede that Africans had the right to gin their own cotton and to sell directly to the world market or to the state purchasing board that had been in place since the war. Their longer-­range hope was to pool members’ funds in order to buy their own ginneries (and coffee curing plant) and to gradually Africanize Uganda’s major agricultural industries. They saw their incipient cooperative movement as an emancipatory project of African-­led modernization. As they sought equal terms in a colonial economy, they were imagining a different, postcolonial social and political order. The soldiers were there to confiscate the farmers’ cotton and to make sure it was either processed and sold as usual or burned. The government, in an effort to disrupt the UAFU boycott, had forbidden the storage of cotton by anyone who was not a licensed ginner or buyer. This was ordered on the pretext that storing the last season’s seed cotton would threaten the scientific development of next year’s crop based on new, government-­sanctioned seed.2 But the confiscations went far beyond the normal in terms of enforcing the Protectorate’s marketing laws. This was a military maneuver against a cooperative society considered by authorities to be a revolutionary threat to British rule. 94

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The action was one part of Governor John Hathorn Hall’s collective punishment orders against Baganda in a dozen sazas (counties) that had been declared “disturbed areas” during clashes between police and protesters two weeks earlier. The “disturbances” occurred after police violently broke up a rally that many UAFU members attended outside the palace of the Kabaka (king of Buganda) in Kampala. Hall banned both the UAFU and its allied Bataka Union, which was an organization of activists who called for democratic reforms to Buganda’s Lukiko (parliament) and for the rescuing of the precolonial power of clans to contest the system of chiefs that had been built under British indirect rule over the preceding fifty years. Hall ordered that the property of both societies be seized, which enabled raids on leaders’ homes as well as the confiscation of crops deposited by farmer-­ members of the cooperative UAFU. There were reports that in some cases the outbuildings and houses where UAFU members stored their cotton were burned down with the cotton inside them. The reports of the burning of houses were dismissed in the official Commission of Inquiry report authored by Sir Donald Kingdon, but Ignatius Musazi, president of the UAFU, insisted the reports were true.3 The cotton confiscations and burnings would be remembered in Buganda’s political culture in the coming years. When a new governor, the Fabian-­friendly Sir Andrew Cohen, arrived to replace Hall two years later, a group of women dancers greeted him with chants in Luganda, “Governor Hall stole our cotton.”4 What enabled the collective punishment of Baganda, which included both cotton confiscations as well as a punitive tax levied against them, was the legal condition of emergency rule. The next two chapters explore how development was politicized and mediated within this frequent condition of the postwar British empire and early decolonization.5 From the late 1940s through the 1950s the technopolitics of rural reconstruction through cooperatives and community development, the roots of which I have been tracing, became absorbed in calculations about security, counterinsurgency, and Cold War ideological battles. In Britain the postwar enthusiasm for colonial cooperative planning in Labour’s new government shifted the Colonial Office to a more centrally planned and aggressive program of cooperative development that aimed to organize peasantries throughout the empire to compete with examples of American and Soviet rural modernization. Soviet plans, which had a strong appeal for many anti-­colonial movements in Africa and Asia, involved collectivization: state-­run farms. In the British postwar model, cooperatives were to be the bridge between levels of big and small development. But as we will see, those plans for cooperative development were contested by independence movements that sought to use cooperatives as spaces of resistance and that deployed their own arguments about how to plan and organize rural development. Nowhere was this more true than in Uganda, in the confrontation between the government and the Bataka movement and the UAFU, which changed its name in 1950 to the Federation of Partnerships of

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Uganda African Farmers. (I use the names interchangeably for ease or combine them into UAFU/Federation as a reminder that they were essentially the same movement organization; the name changes were mostly a method of evading the banning order against the UAFU.) Cooperative politics were at the heart of the farmers’ struggle. They saw their cooperative movement as fundamentally opposed to the official cooperative movement of paternalist Colonial Office and Protectorate planning. In plotting their operations before, during, and after the emergency, the UAFU leaders deployed a critical reading of the state’s cooperatives law and its unfolding infrastructure of rural publicity and supervision. The UAFU president, Musazi, theorized independent African cooperatives as at once a countervision to colonial development and a tool for revolutionary change. Musazi developed a critique of colonial power that combined older Ganda political ideas about the need for powerful, competent, and equitable kings—recalling a precolonial time when Buganda’s kings “ ‘appointed and dismissed [. . .] chiefs at will’ ”—with Harold Laski’s Marxism and Mahatma Gandhi’s solutions for confronting structures of colonial rule through nonviolence.6 Musazi’s theoretical reading was reinforced by direct experience and observation of social struggle and worker organization in Uganda, as well as in Britain, where he studied in the 1920s and 1930s. He was in Britain during the 1926 General W ­ orkers Strike, which shaped his activism later when he was a leader in the trade union movement in Kampala during the 1945 General Strike that led to the last declaration of emergency in Uganda before the emergency of 1949.7 As an anti-­colonial dissident, Musazi spent much of the 1940s and 1950s either in prison; exiled to the outlying districts away from Buganda; or in effective exile in London, where he and his collaborator (and later rival) Semakula Mulumba interacted with the anti-­colonial Left and Pan-­Africanist networks. In London Musazi and Mulumba attempted to leverage networks of support from groups like the Congress of Peoples Against Imperialism, a short-­lived postwar organization in which Independent Labour Party stalwart Fenner Brockway was much involved and that would be succeeded by Brockway’s Movement for Colonial Freedom. This chapter and the next chapter bring the political tensions of postwar rural development into focus through a close examination of the struggle for control of cooperative development in Uganda between the state and Musazi’s UAFU. The events in Uganda illustrate the work of cooperative rural reconstruction under the conditions of emergency rule and show how ideas about development were shaped by postwar ideological contests. First, I examine the transcolonial view of the postwar conjuncture and consider the intersection of decolonization and development in broad terms in order to frame the colonial situation in postwar Uganda. The next chapter explores the political history of the Ganda farmers’ anti-­colonial cooperative movement, which sought to decolonize the Protectorate’s marketing and credit structures and its cooperatives law and supervisory system.

Anti-­e mpire, Development, and Emergency Rule    97 O R G A N I Z I N G C O L D WA R P E A S A N T R I E S

Cooperatives and community development appeared in the late 1940s as entangled objects in the colonial state’s projection of the spectacle of rural modernization. In Africa they were key new agencies in what D. A. Lonsdale and John Low have famously called the “second colonial occupation” in the form of an army of bureaucrats working for a host of expanded state agencies, many in the field of rural development.8 The expansion of the state in rural life in Africa was pushed forward by a new enthusiasm in London and in colonial government houses for scientific agricultural planning that could be enacted through community development. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the problem of world food scarcity (which might catalyze major new conflicts) rebooted discussions about cooperatives as the basis for rural development. Beginning with the 1943 United Nations Hot Springs conference on food and agriculture, a brief moment opened for the airing of internationalist dreams of a coordinated world food plan, though these were soon to be cut short by Cold War rivalries. The new United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) might have become an agency that acted like Britain’s Ministry of Food on a global scale, coordinating levels of production, shaping supply chains, and controlling prices in order to direct the global flow of agricultural commodities for human need rather than profit. Instead it would serve merely as a research and advice hub to help states shape their own food policies, which could easily be made to support national strategies to defend imperial holdings and zones of influence.9 From the outset cooperatives were a key focal point of the FAO’s work.10 One set of resolutions of the Hot Springs conference called for the encouragement everywhere of consumer and producer cooperatives “in order to make it possible for people to help themselves in lowering costs of production and costs of distribution and marketing.”11 The new enthusiasm for agricultural planning took hold in British colonial bureaucracies. Cooperatives quickly surfaced as the preferred technology for organizing agriculture on an empire-­wide scale, building on the Colonial Office’s accumulated expertise and prior practice with cooperative development from its interwar efforts. New entities like the Colonial Development Corporation funded programs of development that would maximize agricultural production, focusing on the use of fertilizers and mechanization in conjunction with planned cooperative farming schemes.12 In places with peasant ownership of land, colonial governments looked for ways to bring credit and marketing cooperatives into coordination with the held-­over wartime regimes of marketing boards in order to expand agricultural commodity production, standardize quality, and control prices. This inter-­operation of cooperatives with marketing boards was the case, for instance, in postwar Ghana in the all-­important cocoa industry, as well as in Uganda with cotton and coffee.13

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Figure 1. Batu Seblas Co-­operative Rice Mill Society, Ltd., Kelantan, Malaya, 1950. This Central Office of Information photo was used to promote cooperative development. The publicity statement on the reverse reads: “ ‘It Pays To Co-­operate.’ Paying for Paddy. This Malay farmer is receiving payment for the paddy which he has brought into the mill at the Batu Seblas Co-­operative Rice Mill Society, Ltd., in Kelantan. The co-­operatives are doing much to help their members understand simple economic principles and to make use of their new-­found knowledge.” Source: The National Archives of the UK, ref. INF10/206/71.

Perceived crises of food security could generate discussions throughout the empire about how colonial governments could use cooperatives, combined with scientific management, to direct peasant farming choices toward specific food needs. Already the problem was shaped by the ideological contours of the Cold War. Immediately after the war, for instance, the Colonial Office worried that a rice shortage would leave the empire’s Asian populations more vulnerable to ideological threats and insurgencies (especially in places like Malaya and Hong Kong, where it “must strengthen the hands of the communists”).14 This prompted the Colonial Office to request that specific colonies study and introduce schemes to maximize rice cultivation, and some colonial governments came up with plans to enlist cooperatives to try to consolidate peasant holdings in order to allow for mechanized farming.15

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From the vantage point of Whitehall, cooperative development had come into its own as part of the British machinery of colonial government. The new Labour government’s colonial policies were greatly influenced by the Fabian Colonial Bureau, and they pushed cooperatives as both a panacea for rural problems of debt and poverty as well as a useful adjunct for developing institutions and citizens for a multiracial, democratic commonwealth.16 Encouraged by the enthusiasm for cooperation coming out of the UN Hot Springs conference, in 1945 the Fabian Colonial Bureau produced a comprehensive study of the progress of the cooperative movement in the British empire that was meant to “facilitate the work” recommended at Hot Springs.17 Members of the Fabian special committee on colonial cooperation believed in the vision of an internationalist coordination of agriculture. Cooperatives would be instrumental and necessary in easing access for colonial producers to participate in the expected “post-­war planning machinery.” The Fabian committee also pointed to the civic training that cooperatives could provide. Not only would cooperatives be an incubator for developing potential national leaders, but the democratic values and economic fluencies inculcated in cooperatives would prepare colonial cooperators for their eventual participation on the marketing and price control boards that would likely become the primary infrastructure of internationally planned agriculture.18 The Fabian committee was preoccupied as well with older British imperial concerns about ensuring that a system of governmental registration and supervision was in place to control the movements (though they also hoped that allies from the ranks of British cooperators would volunteer to advise fledgling cooperative movements in the colonies). The key recommendation of the study was that a model cooperative ordinance should be written in the Colonial Office and used to formulate laws throughout the empire in every colony that did not already have a controlling ordinance and bureaucracy.19 Labour’s Colonial Office acted quickly, drafting just such a model cooperative ordinance and sending it to governments throughout the empire. Colonial Secretary George Henry Hall also issued a circular asking all territories to take specific steps to create the now-­standard Indian Civil Service cooperative framework of bureaucratically managed publicity and demonstration, registration, and audit.20 In practical terms this meant that every colonial territory should at minimum pass the controlling law (and related model rules) and create the government position of Registrar of Cooperatives. Wherever possible an entirely separate Cooperative Department should be set up. The Colonial Office also asked governments to submit annual reports on the progress of cooperative development (which many already were doing before the war).21 These would now circulate within a new central depot for research and advice on colonial cooperatives at the Colonial Office, the Advisory Committee on Cooperation in Colonies. The Advisory Committee’s chair, B. J. Surridge, former Registrar of Cooperatives in Cyprus, now essentially

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took on Strickland’s former role as chief consultant on the writing of cooperatives laws. Surridge coauthored A Manual of Cooperative Law and Practice, which he intended to be used as a practical guide for the personnel of colonial cooperative departments. It encompassed the years of experimentation in cooperative rural reconstruction in India, Malaya, Africa, and elsewhere, drawing substantially from earlier works by Punjab Registrars, including Strickland, Malcolm Darling, and especially Hugh Calvert.22 Most of the book was a clause-­by-­clause commentary on the new model law, showing how each provision addressed specific problems of rural economics. While cooperatives undoubtedly sparked enthusiasm for those interested in the possibilities of central planning, it is important to appreciate just how much the postwar period was an ascendant moment for community development concepts. This shaped the deep appeal of cooperatives in British colonial planning. Community development was becoming formalized in late colonial and postcolonial governmental practice. It focused on inducing development from below (from the village outward) and on discovering community-­centered mechanisms for small-­ group planning of development goals. New departments of community development proliferated in British colonies. The surge in postwar interest in community development was boosted by the aggressive expansion of the US development aid and expertise apparatus targeting the non-­aligned world in pursuit of its containment strategy against communism. In India, Nehru’s government undertook a national strategy of community development in 1952 that by 1965 reached into every village in India. The United States supported Nehru’s community development campaign with $54 million in funding as well as the guiding advice of its experts, drawn from centers of communitarian rural sociological research like the US Bureau of Agricultural Economics.23 As should be clear from the preceding chapters, community development was not wholly an import of US social scientific origin. Rather, as we saw with the Jeanes schools and mass education in the last chapter, ideas about community development circulated between imperial metropoles and in internationalist development spaces of the League of Nations (or now the FAO), largely sustained by rural sociological research about cooperatives and adapted education for Africa (though of course the latter also bore a pronounced stamp of US expertise). Postwar British experts in rural economics continued to study their American counterparts and drew inspiration from large-­scale projects that bridged big development to small. But cooperatives remained the bedrock of British rural development planning. Cooperative bureaucracies in India, Ceylon, Malaya, West and East Africa, and the West Indies had long been spaces of experimentation with concepts of community development. The cooperatives law and accumulated colonial social science refined in cooperatives departments came with mechanisms for group formation and procedures for group decision-­making.

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Figure 2. Electrified cotton ginnery near Kampala, Uganda. This p ­ ublicity photo p ­ romotes the benefits of the new Owen Falls hydroelectric scheme, which started p ­ owering ginneries in 1954. Source: The National Archives of the UK, ref. INF10/365/23.

Cooperatives and other forms of community development in British practice continued to come with their hard-­wired hierarchies of teacher-­student, developed versus developing. In the case of cooperatives these were enacted through the routines of registration, audit, and supervision and advice from cooperative assistants. In the Colonial Office’s postwar formula, cooperatives work needed almost the

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same kind of new officer as community development work required: experienced “administrator[s] and social worker[s]” rather than agricultural specialists.24 In a place like Uganda these would be the indispensable personnel to bridge high modernist development, like the planned Owen Falls Dam that would power Uganda’s cotton ginneries and coffee curing stations, with community-­level engagement of farming families and groups. Ugandan officials treated cooperative economics and community development as closely related, mutually reinforcing projects. A 1952 government commission to study the progress of the cooperative movement in parts of the Protectorate urged government to include a training school for cooperative officers in its newly proposed community development center, since “any school of community development which does not teach the economics of community development is lacking in a fundamental conception of community development.”25 The advice was hardly necessary. When the Nsamizi Local Government and Community Development Training Centre was built in Entebbe, the government recruited P. E. W. Williams, a former head of the Jeanes school in Kabete, Kenya, to be the Training Centre’s first principal.26 As discussed in chapter 2, the Jeanes school was celebrated in the Colonial Office as an important incubator of community development theory and practice, and classes in cooperative economics were emphasized in its curriculum starting in the 1930s. The new Nsamizi school would have basic and advanced courses on cooperatives not only for the rural staff of the Cooperative Department but eventually also for their wives.27 The most celebrated British exemplar of big and small development bridged together was the irrigated cotton-­growing scheme on the Gezira Plain in Sudan. There cooperatives and community development were built after the war as new components of an enormous technosocial system of canals and villages that since the 1920s had gradually turned the plain into a high-­output agricultural zone to serve Lancashire’s relentless demand for cheap cotton. The scheme was from the beginning scientifically planned and ordered with intense administrative calculation. Postwar reforms moved the Gezira scheme out of the control of a commercial syndicate and into the control of a government board that was now to have a new “social development” remit. James Robertson, civil secretary and head of the political service in Sudan after the war, extolled the future possibilities that the scheme could be more than “a machine for the production of cotton and money” and instead be “a real experiment in mass education, in social improvements, in co-­operative enterprise, in democratic control of local administration.”28 Arthur Gaitskell, brother of the titanic Labour politician Hugh Gaitskell, managed the grandiose project after the war. He and others among the local management of Gezira saw an affinity between their own work and what was being accomplished in the United States with the Tennessee Valley Authority. It was not the size of the TVA that appealed to Gaitskell but rather the attention to community development and to finding ways to build grassroots participation into such a

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vast, technological system.29 Gaitskell saw development in Cold War contours. Gezira’s promised fusion of participatory community development with scientific, technologically enhanced agriculture might prove its worth as an “alternative to communism in the uncommitted world.”30 Gezira was the demonstration plot of all demonstration plots. Its wider imperial life beyond Sudan was as a spectacle of the British ideal of rural modernization: agriculture shaped around villages engaged in cooperative farming and cooperative marketing of their produce, feeding profits back into community development projects. However far removed the reality of colonial situations and conditions for peasant families and agricultural wage workers, Gezira was there to invoke the model situation. The pure essence of Gezira as spectacle of rural modernization would have been found in the demonstration village set among the Gezira canal complex. There a single field officer after the war was tasked with “the complete development of one village” to make it appear as it should in 1975, when “everything possible was to be done by machinery and drudgery reduced to minimum.”31 In reality, though, many of the Gezira tenants ended up engaging mostly in trade, transport, or other wage activities rather than farming, and the plots were mostly worked by seasonal migrant laborers from central and western Sudan.32 And yet Gezira still spawned pilot schemes in other colonies, like the Niger Agricultural Project in Nigeria (a mechanized groundnut farming scheme).33 An imitation of Gezira was also suggested in Uganda’s “Ten-­Year Development Plan,” introduced in 1946 by Hall’s government. The plan was written by E. B. Wor­ thington, who was influential earlier in his career in Uganda (and especially as a member of Lord Hailey’s African Survey in the 1930s) in bringing scientific research, particularly ecology, into the broader project of developing Africa.34 Worthington’s development plan for Uganda focused overwhelmingly on the agricultural future of the colony and carried a heavy dose of optimism for the possibilities of scientific growing and better organization of land use through demonstration and publicity. The plan proposed that pilot schemes should be set up wherein many of the principles of Gezira could be on display and publicized throughout the colony with the help of the new Department of Public Relations and Social Welfare (I provide more on that organization in the discussion of the struggle waged by the Ganda farmers against the colonial state). The level of social services on offer in such planned, rationalized agricultural spaces would be presented in propaganda as the near-­ future living standards in the colony, approximating “what may be possible in all parts of Uganda in ten or twenty years time.”35 Cooperatives were a key part of the future imagined in the Uganda plan. They presented a way to begin to move toward organized agriculture, even if consolidated peasant plots and farming on a village model still seemed remote. The Protectorate government passed the Colonial Office’s recommended cooperative ordinance earlier in 1946, the same year as Worthington’s plan. In Hall’s preface

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to Worthington’s Development Plan he envisioned cooperatives as the bridge to carry a peasantry of fragmented plots and unscientific farming into a future of scientific management; “economic units” large enough for mechanization; and village communities equipped with schools, health-­care services, and welfare centers. He hoped that eventually producer cooperatives would seek greater profits through mechanization and that this in turn would push peasants to consolidate their holdings. Large, consolidated holdings would finally make way for the construction of village communities “so strangely and unfortunately lacking at present” and, eventually, to “some form of collective agriculture.”36 But as systems for organizing agriculture in British Africa, Gezira and its imitative pilot projects in Uganda and elsewhere were exceptional spaces of colonial utopian dreaming (pulling in odd ways, given the anti-­communism of British officials, from Soviet development concepts of collectivization). The utopian plans were almost nowhere descriptive of colonial reality in Africa in the 1940s and 1950s. The “exit option”—peasants’ ability to withdraw from a cash market into subsistence farming—and other tools of peasant resistance made the prospects of top-­down change difficult, no matter the ambitions of scientific planners like Worthington.37 Commodities like cotton and coffee were too important to the colonial economy for government to endanger their steady supply—a reality that gave groups that could organize farmers’ growing choices, like Musazi’s UAFU, a particularly threatening power. A key example from outside Buganda is how Gisu coffee farmers on the slopes of Mount Elgon used the threat of the exit option to negotiate higher prices from the government’s special marketing scheme set up specifically for the Mount Elgon area (the one place where the government allowed Africans to grow the higher-­grade arabica beans). The nature of coffee farming amplified this power for Gisu farmers. Because coffee trees took four years to grow to maturity, the mere threat of destroying the trees could win important concessions from the state.38 So while Hall considered that even the Soviet model of collective farming might be superior to the current peasant mode, he believed such a transformation would require “regimentation and dragooning” that would never be acceptable to Africans.39 The colonial state’s relative weakness to impose any alternative land system in the face of mobilized African protest spelled out for Governor Hall that there was no question land development would have to continue on a peasant basis for the near future. Cooperatives would need to work within already existing structures and organize a small-­plot peasantry. In Uganda cotton was the most important crop. In the early days of Protectorate rule the infrastructure for ginning and exporting it was decentralized, with many Africans and Indians operating hand gins and selling raw cotton to agents of commercial traders, often based in Bombay. The Lancashire-­based British Cotton Growing Association insisted that marketing needed to be centralized and overseen

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Figure 3. A farmer has his cotton weighed at a ginnery in Uganda, 1955. The photo was part of a series of photos depicting occupations and services in Uganda, compiled by the Central of Office of Information. Source: The National Archives of the UK, ref. INF10/365/1.

by government in order to ensure quality. This was accomplished through a series of changes to the Cotton Rules.40 Most importantly, licensing fees for ginners and permits for market buyers were required, pushing out the hand ginners and small traders, who did not have the savings or credit to maintain a license. By the time of the Uganda farmers’ protest in 1949, the typical route for cotton from peasant plot to market was through large, European-­and Indian-­owned ginneries and through licensed buyers linked to credit from commercial banks.41 Meanwhile, the legacy of wartime imperial marketing through boards remained, and Ganda farmers objected to a price control fund that allowed the Lint Marketing Board to maintain huge cash surpluses while paying low prices to African growers.42 In coffee, too, the state used price controls and a price stabilization fund that drew protests from Africans. The Uganda system split the marketing of coffee (to be sold to the Ministry of Food and other buyers) into separate “Native” and “Non-­native” marketing boards that gave lower prices to Africans. The official rationale for this what that the African “unwashed” kiboko coffee was of an

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inferior quality to “washed” coffee of non-­African estate owners. But even African farmer organizations that were ready to process using the same methods as others selling “washed” coffee were barred from selling through the “Non-­native” board. This helped create a situation in which non-­Africans could illegally buy low-­priced kiboko coffee at low prices and then sell at a much higher price at the Mombasa auctions.43 The unregistered cooperative “Musazi groups” of the UAFU brought African cotton and coffee farmers together into a cooperative movement meant to break down the power of a market regulatory law that safeguarded a colonial hierarchy. Masaka district, one of the key zones of coffee growing in Buganda, was one of the true power centers for the UAFU, though it was the cotton farmers and their threat of boycott that posed the greatest threat in the minds of authorities during the months leading up to the protests and subsequent declaration of emergency. Some European and Indian cotton buyers and ginnery owners had long been concerned that a movement like Musazi’s, with explicit goals to create African-­ centered economic solidarities, could use cooperatives as a weapon against Europeans and Indians involved in cotton and coffee processing and marketing. The first hints of a cooperatives ordinance came in 1935, shortly after Strickland’s tours of East and West Africa (though he did not visit Uganda). Members of the Uganda Growers Union supported cooperative legislation that would give them legal standing to seek and obtain bank loans.44 It was not, however, the petitions of the farmers that prompted the Colonial Office and the Protectorate authorities to hurry to write a controlling law. Rather, the perception of an incipient cooperative movement provoked concern among officials about the dangers of cooperatives growing in the absence of governmental supervision—a concern nurtured on Strickland’s philosophy that “native cooperation” should never outpace the growth of cooperatives law and a controlling bureaucracy of registration and audit.45 In 1937 the Protectorate government introduced a bill that stuck to Strickland’s formula and was mostly based on the Tanganyika ordinance that Strickland had earlier helped to draft as part of the British colonial government’s effort to take down the Chagga coffee growers’ protest movement against indirect rule on Kilimanjaro. Immediately there was organized European and Indian opposition among ­ginnery owners and licensed cotton buyers. The Uganda Chamber of Commerce, the Eastern Province Chamber of Commerce, and the Uganda Cotton Association rallied opposition to the bill. Their lobbying organization in London, the Joint East African Board, sent a letter of alarm to the colonial under-­secretary, insisting the bill could “injure the development of the important Cotton industry in which considerable sums of British capital have been invested.”46 In arguments to the Uganda Executive Council, detractors of the bill warned that African cooperatives would inevitably become powerful as vehicles for anti-­immigrant,

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African race politics capable of disrupting the chain of cotton supply. They pointed to examples of politicized cooperatives in Tanganyika (the Chagga coffee farmer protests discussed in chapter 1 were in full swing at the time of debating the Uganda bill) as heralding what was to come if “radically-­minded natives” were encouraged to start cooperatives.47 In their internal communications Colonial Office officials dismissed these arguments as “rubbish,” exuding confidence that so long as Strickland’s model was in place the state would have sufficient control to steer the movement away from politics.48 Even so, the pressure of the anti-­bill lobby prevailed; the bill was dropped and not picked up again before the war. Only in 1946, with the new energy behind an empire-­wide cooperative strategy of development, did Uganda finally pass a cooperatives law. It carried with it the inherited forms of paternalistic, British agricultural technopolitics: required registration, routine audit, powers of the Registrar to dismiss elected officers and liquidate societies. The Uganda law went even further than the Colonial Office’s model ordinance with a clause that allowed the Registrar to appoint a manager of his choosing to any society. While there was no clause strictly prohibiting a society from engaging in politics—as actually was the case in some places, for instance Iraq and Egypt—the Registrar was given great autonomy to exercise a political veto if he chose to do so. He could encourage certain societies while holding back others. The outsized power of the Registrar generated tremendous ill will among farmers, especially those joining Musazi’s UAFU. In postwar British Africa, where emergency measures would often rule over labor and market relations in the 1940s to the 1960s, African farmers often found it difficult to discern the line (since there really wasn’t one) between cooperative departments that presented themselves as friends of the farmer and the more repressive agencies of the colonial state. As we will see, this was especially true in Uganda. To sum up, we should not conclude that because the colonial state had uses for cooperatives that this meant that state promotion drove the adoption of cooperatives by tens of thousands of peasant farmers in Uganda. It was rather that the postwar push from the Colonial Office and from various locations of community development expertise happened to coincide with the growing use of cooperatives by African farmers as strategies to overcome layers of colonial marketing structure and law (including the cooperatives law) that were racially defined and exploitative. A collision between colonial and anti-­colonial development visions loomed large at the end of the 1940s in Uganda and in other parts of the British empire, and a key point of struggle was over control of the cooperative movement. R A D IC A L SPAC E S

While Colonial Office experts expressed optimism about the capacity of the cooperative law and its systems of control to keep an incipient cooperative movement

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nonpolitical, there always was a negative anticipation lurking in the background for officials: that rural associations enabled by the state’s development initiatives could be overrun by anti-­colonial political movements. Cooperatives were in danger of becoming “radical spaces,” to repurpose for colonial situations Margaret Kohn’s concept from her study of cooperatives and other spaces of worker organization and utopian envisioning in early twentieth-­century Italy.49 Officials’ earlier concern about the threat of too-­rapid social change (and their hope that various forms of community development might be a bridge between “traditional” society and the modern future) did not disappear. However, after World War II that concern was eclipsed by more pressing fears about specific political formations, parties, and ideologies now seen as dangers to British rule. This focused a preoccupation in colonial government with how rural extension services and publicity tools could be used to steer colonial people away from ideological alternatives to the colonial order. As we will see with postwar Uganda, projecting and supervising community development now fully merged with the campaign against subversive movements (real and imagined) of nationalists and communists. For officials anxious about the growing political challenges to colonial authority, rural and urban credit, marketing, and consumer associations seemed to teeter on the edge of becoming subversive political clubs or parties. Colonial Office officials and advisers typically measured the success of cooperative development in terms of numbers of societies started; numbers of new members; and the degree of completeness of a colony’s cooperative bureaucracy to oversee the various forms of credit, marketing, farming, and consumer cooperation that might emerge. But the scaling up of “the movement” now often brought with it the possibility that insurgent ideologies could be given an organizational space in which to flourish and access to sources of credit that could be applied to subversive ends. Malaya, for instance, with its long-­standing cooperatives law and requisite supervisory system, was a renowned success. In 1948 Sir Alexander Cavendish, the retired former Registrar who was largely responsible for building the state cooperative bureaucracy in Malaya, marveled that the cooperative movement seemed unscathed by “the ravages of war and three and a half years of hostile Japanese occupation.” But Cavendish still emphasized the importance of members walking “warily when near any political, racial and religious bogs and quicksands into which so many short-­sighted and fanatical zealots so often fall.”50 He wrote that in March 1948, two months before the declaration of emergency that would initiate a decade-­long war between British military forces and the communist Malayan National Liberation Army. During the emergency, cooperatives became spaces of organization and recruitment for the Malayan Communist Party. In 1951 police arrested some members of the Singapore Cooperative Society in an attempt to purge the organization of its suspected communist infiltrators.51

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Cyprus, as another example, when scored solely by the numbers looked like a whopping success: “second only to Palestine in its cooperative development” in the Fabian Colonial Bureau’s postwar assessment.52 But numbers and the mere presence of a bureaucratic system could be deceiving, especially during the politically tumultuous late 1940s and early 1950s, which witnessed rising political conflict between Turkish and Greek nationalist parties on the island as well as the steady growth of a communist party. To the dismay of British authorities in Cyprus in the Cooperative Department and the Executive Council and to officials in the Colonial Office, cooperatives (especially co-­op shops in the villages) were increasingly started by members of the communist Progressive Party of Working People, or AKEL.53 The prospect of communist infiltration of the cooperative movement was worrying to officials, including to Surridge, in charge of London’s Advisory Committee on Cooperation in the Colonies (himself a former cooperatives Registrar of Cyprus).54 One Colonial Office official noted there was “as much danger to the British position from this ‘cellular’ attack in Cyprus as there would be if there was an outbreak of violence. Indeed I think the danger greater.”55 What he meant was that communism could take power peacefully by infiltrating the cooperative movement and gradually taking over sectors of the economy. This was not what the cooperatives law was intended to produce. The Cyprus Executive Council decided that the Registrar should do “everything within his power . . . to ensure that the infiltration of Communists into the co-­operative movement was resisted with every weapon at his command.” The acting governor of Cyprus wanted the Registrar to apply a political test to every new application from a startup cooperative, weeding out those associated with AKEL. This proved unworkable. It would have been easily done in places like Egypt or Iraq, where the cooperatives ordinances placed a blanket ban on all political and religious activity, but the law in Cyprus did not contain such a provision.56 A cold war under siege mentality similarly shaped official views of the possibilities and dangers of cooperative development in Uganda. As Musazi’s UAFU grew in membership and refused to participate in the state’s bureaucratic supervisory system, Ugandan officials, like those in Cyprus and Malaya, worried that cooperatives could be turned into anti-­colonial communist cells. John Stonehouse, who was hired by Musazi’s farmers’ union as an adviser, recalled one extraordinary evening training session on cooperative practice and principles that is a telling example of officials’ anxieties about the radical space that the UAFU had opened up: When I arrived at the hall on the first night of the course I found that our advertising had not been good enough for only six people had turned up. The number in itself did not discourage me but the reasons for their attendance were definitely disturbing! One, a European, was a Co-­operative Officer who had been sent along by the [Co-­operative] Department to make a report on what I was saying. Another

110     Anti-­e mpire, Development, and Emergency Rule European was a policeman from the [counter-­insurgency] Special Branch. He had understood that I was going to talk about Communism! Three of the four Africans were spies from various Government departments, and only one was a genuine student.57

The UAFU did not aspire to collectivization along the lines of the Soviet model, but the anti-­colonial development imaginary that it did elaborate around African marketing and African control of agricultural processing equipment—namely the ginneries—was still frightening for officials. It was also the case that officials tended to view African anti-­colonial movements as either linked to conspiracies of communist insurgents or especially vulnerable to them. It is probably better to say that most officials in Entebbe imagined full African independence and the takeover of the colony by communism as the exact same, catastrophic possible future. The pages of the Uganda Herald during the weeks leading up to the 1949 protests (and the declaration of a state of emergency and confiscation of cotton and collective punishment in reaction) contained a swirl of reporting on the various political threats facing Uganda, the empire, and the “West” at large. Almost on a daily basis the front page featured stories about striking workers; protests, riots, and “disturbances” in all parts of Africa; local communist insurgent cells; or communist armies on the march in the world. On the day that the Uganda Herald reported Ganda activists were planning a strike and protest assembly outside the Kabaka’s palace, that story was overshadowed on the front page by the headline, “CHINESE REDS FIRE ON BRITISH WARSHIPS” and other coverage of the denouement of the Chinese Civil War as the People’s Liberation Army crossed the Yangtze River before taking Nanjing. As for the Kampala “disturbances” that followed the protests and precipitated the emergency declaration, these were immediately diagnosed by the paper’s editors as the product of “a few Communist-­inspired agitators [who] have been responsible for creating discontent where no discontent existed before.”58 At the same time the state of emergency of 1949 was declared in a panic that protest movements in Buganda were deeply connected to gathering protests by Kikuyu activists in nearby Kenya and that they heralded an imminent uprising of the combined forces of Ganda and Kikuyu anti-­colonial revolutionaries.59 The Protectorate government certainly treated the ongoing Ganda protests and activism as if they were directly coordinated with Kikukyu nationalists.60 When officials in Entebbe learned of planned Ganda protests outside the jails where some UAFU and Bataka leaders had been imprisoned after the April disturbances, they enlisted the Royal Air Force to terrify the protesters by flying attack planes low over them. The pilots were instructed to first fly over the Rift Valley in Kenya to harass a rumored Kikuyu protest that might form in solidarity with the Baganda.61 The use of planes for crowd intimidation only inflamed anti-­government feeling

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in Buganda. When the Commission of Inquiry into the 1949 disturbances recommended that a plane marked “Uganda Police” should routinely fly over crowds as a deterrent, Musazi blasted the idea: “Should such a stupid recommendation be adopted, the Uganda Government must be prepared to meet the worst.”62 The rise of the UAFU and the Bataka movement took place on the eve of the first settler panics over anti-­colonial “Mau Mau” oath taking in Kenya.63 The anxiety about parallel or coordinated uprisings in East Africa reached London. The first questions in Parliament about Mau Mau came in October 1952, and the Mau Mau events immediately began to shape the debates around colonial government, economy, and development for all of East Africa. Labour MP Leslie Hale, who visited Uganda and toured the UAFU groups and considered himself an ally of the farmers, used the specter of violence beginning in Kenya to urge action by Parliament, now under restored Conservative leadership, to invest significant funds in cooperative development. “There is coming a time,” he warned his fellow MPs, “when the Africans’ resentment will be turned against all Europeans. . . . If that time comes, we shall have very little defence in view of the economic circumstances in which we have allowed the African to live.”64

4

Uganda’s Anti-­colonial Cooperative Movement

The Uganda African Farmers Union (UAFU) was everything that officials and their rural experts had secretly feared all along about cooperative development. The system invented in late nineteenth-­century India and epitomized in Punjab was supposed to organize farmer groups for credit and marketing and village ­societies of men and women for various community development projects. It was supposed to mold character in ways that supported the aims of British rulers and missionaries, not be host to subversive ideologies. The UAFU, though, was an overtly political rural association whose members and leaders claimed to be the authentic cooperative movement in the territory. They were vocal about their aim to organize cooperatives in subversive ways, especially through boycotts, in order to bring about democratic reforms in Uganda’s politics and economy. And while the state’s cooperative system proceeded gradually and cautiously just as Strickland advised, this subversive cooperative movement grew quickly and had much more popular support than the ‘official cooperative movement.’ Ignatius Musazi, the UAFU’s leader, saw the society foremost as a political force to wield against colonial power in the countryside. He wanted the cooperative movement to be the rural parallel to the trade union movement in Kampala that he had been much involved with in the previous years. In 1945 he helped to organize the transport workers’ strike, which brought the movement of the colony’s commodities to a halt for several days and also had been met by an official declaration of emergency. In fact, Musazi later saw “the 1949 civil disturbances” that precipitated the declaration of emergency and cotton confiscations with which we began the previous chapter as a “continuation or a revival of the 1945 disturbances.” The most important connection between them was that Governor John Hathorn Hall 112

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“reign[ed]” over both of them.1 From 1948 to 1952 Musazi’s unregistered (and for most of 1949–50, outlawed) cooperative union challenged the colonial order over Uganda’s two most important export crops: cotton and coffee. Later I also refer to the farmers’ organization by the name of its successor organization, the Federation of African Partnerships (the Federation), which kept the anti-­colonial cooperative movement in Uganda alive after the UAFU was banned following the “disturbances” of April 1949. Musazi, the several directors of the UAFU/Federation, and rank-­and-­file members aimed to take apart key components of the colonial technology of cooperative development that I have tracked so far in this book, targeting the inflated power of the Registrar and the mechanisms in the system to curtail politics. They sought instead to make cooperatives work to disrupt the colonial economy and to launch an independence movement that eventually led to the formation of the Uganda National Congress. Farmers joined the “Musazi groups” for many reasons, but a great number of them shared an enthusiasm for Musazi’s political vision of a postcolonial state and economy under African control. The history of the UAFU as an anti-­colonial movement shows just how powerful cooperatives could be in the context of early decolonization when they detached from the legal and bureaucratic moorings of the official development regime. As we will see, the struggle between the farmers and the agents of state-­ directed development was not just over control of all-­important cotton and coffee and their infrastructures of processing and marketing. It also was a struggle over the creation and use of political networks and the information channels involved in cooperative organization. While officials in London and Entebbe worried about the radical and inscrutable spaces of the farmers’ unregistered cooperatives and were desperate to bring the organization under official control, the leaders of the farmers’ movement took advantage of the local, imperial, and international linkages of cooperatives to advance an anti-­colonial politics. T H E G R OU N D O F ST RU G G L E

Political transformations since the founding of British rule in Uganda formed the background of the farmers’ protest. The original 1900 Uganda Agreement between the Kabaka and the British ceded the land of Uganda outside the Kingdom of Buganda to the British Crown. From there European expatriate commercial firms operated large tea, coffee, and cotton estates worked by tenant-­laborers as well as by immigrant Banyarwanda workers. In Buganda in the south, the center of the 1949 protests, the situation was different. The 1900 Agreement created a land-­tenure system known as the mailo system (land measured in square miles). Mailo land was distributed to the Kabaka’s select chiefs, forming them into a new Protestant aristocracy. All other Baganda became at-­will tenants, which meant that if they could not afford the rent, they could be evicted.2

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The pattern of land development in Buganda might have followed that of the large European-­owned estates elsewhere in Uganda, which over time might have converted Ganda tenants into wage laborers. However, additional laws governing land rights and tax on mailo land were passed in 1928. These dictated that tenants could not sell their farms, but they could no longer be evicted, and their children could inherit the land on the same terms. Moreover, so long as a peasant’s plots did not exceed three acres for any single cash-­crop, the tax would be limited (beyond that point the chief could charge whatever he liked).3 Together the new terms of tenure and tax all but ensured that cash-­crop agriculture in Buganda would be driven by a small-­plot peasantry and not by the large-­scale plantations that Governor Hall would have preferred. That said, there was persistent fear among Baganda from the 1920s through the 1950s that one day Uganda would come under the power of European settlers in nearby Kenya and all land rights would be swept away by a wave of dispossessions. These fears spiked every time there was a new idea for some form of “closer union” of British East African territories, which was the case once again in the late 1940s as officials raised ideas of unifying key governmental services in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda under a single East African High Commission.4 It was the Ganda long-­term tenants on the carved-­from-­mailo small plots who organized cooperatives in the 1940s and comprised the membership of the UAFU. Most members lived and worked on their own small farms and relied on the labor of their families and sometimes one or two wage laborers, who often were Banyarwanda migrant workers from nearby Belgian colonies, especially from the 1920s forward.5 The allocation of mailo land to the Kabaka’s select chiefs and the extension of British indirect rule was disruptive to Ganda political institutions.6 The British amplified the power of chiefs by making them the main personnel of the rural administrative structure (meanwhile the British extended this system beyond Buganda to Bunyoro, Teso, Toro, Bugisu, and other places in the Protectorate). Many of the activists who gathered outside the Kabaka’s palace in 1949 viewed the more powerful chiefs as illegitimate and lamented how Ganda systems of political authority had eroded since the 1900 Agreement. Where once authority was mediated through clans and clan heads (the Abataka) and based on connections to the land and the ancestors buried there, political authority had now been usurped by powerful chiefs backed by the British.7 Members and leaders of the political movement that adopted the Bataka name in the 1940s and 1950s, which included many UAFU members, spoke for and acted on behalf of Buganda’s grandfathers and grandsons. They claimed a fidelity to the real source of belonging and authority as mutual protectors of “Buganda Nyaffe (Buganda our mother).”8 The Bataka Union’s claims of attachment to place and its purported local sources of authority (in the ancestral lands uniting generations of Baganda)

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offered a powerful counterargument to the postwar British insistence that the aims of African political development should be to anchor Africans in “imperial modern institutions” like those forming the framework of a British Commonwealth.9 Bataka members were populists who sought to “offend their antagonists, to clarify the interests that commoners shared, and to summon an egalitarian political community into being.”10 They developed a political rhetoric that was deliberately rude and confrontational in defiance of the polite politics practiced by Anglican church leaders, Protectorate officials, and Ganda elites.11 The Bataka and the UAFU were vessels for an array of postwar African political causes. There was no formal membership in the Bataka Union, but the movement clustered into local groups, and these often became the natural groupings of farmers forming the cells of the UAFU, or what officials called “Musazi groups.”12 The activists of these entwined movements protested at the April 1949 gathering by demanding a democratic overhaul of the chief system, insisting that chiefs should be elected. They also argued that the Lukiko, the advisory council to the Kabaka, should have more elected rather than appointed members. Many could easily contemplate the end of the British empire in Uganda. Semakula Mulumba, who more than anyone was blamed for inciting the disturbances, wrote in a letter to the Kabaka that Mulumba forwarded as well to the United Nations: “We want the British government to enjoy the unique honour of quitting a country in the Commonwealth, with their heads in the air, without a stab in the back. We want the annulment of all the British Agreements in Uganda.”13 Musazi also wanted to see the political and social system of Uganda free from the weight of the 1900 Agreement and to strike at British rule by democratizing the Lukiko. According to Musazi, the political trouble in Uganda at the end of the 1940s sprang from a British insistence that Africans were not yet ready for self-­government. He wrote, “We do not want a superimposed rule by those who always think they know better the type of Government the African must have.”14 Members of these movements imagined a postcolonial nation free from British domination, but there was room for disagreement about which Ganda institutions to emphasize. Many UAFU members focused on clans to reconfigure authority and political community. Musazi and others, though, emphasized the importance of reforming the monarchy itself and seem to have held the hope that an equitable Kabaka could revamp society.15 At the same time, inspired by Harold Laski, Musazi could invoke the power of revolution from below against despotism.16 He demanded “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Though he was himself a member of the Ganda aristocracy, he thought the K ­ abaka’s prime minister, owing partly to the “attitude he attaches to his birth,” knew nothing about “the burning needs of the common man.”17 While Musazi sought Ganda sources for his political theory, he also advanced an anti-­colonial political modernism that focused on development while seeking to dismantle British rule

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(though still leaving room for the possibility of a mutually beneficial commonwealth).18 He believed that the “serious disillusionment and unrest in the Colonies today” was the result of “misunderstanding all round of what is possible.” British officials, he argued, refused to “grapple with the serious and complexed problems of social and economic organizations of this modern era.”19 Musazi elaborated a countervision of cooperative development that deliberately crossed the prohibited border between politics and economics. His anti-­colonial political strategy hinged on delivering powerful expressions of political solidarity through organized economic action and connecting these radical acts to a future vision of “Africa Empya” (the New Africa).20 Musazi’s description of the UAFU’s forward-­thinking development mission provides a glimpse of his imagined future for Uganda. It bears some resemblance to the vision of rural reconstruction and community development ­modeled in Gezira’s “1975 future village” or imagined in E. B. Worthington’s 1946 Development Plan—that is, a plan of rural modernization organized around community associations that directs its gains toward programs of social welfare. Indeed, Musazi’s successor organization to the UAFU, the Federation, even had its own cooperative maize farm to experiment with “new farming methods” and mechanized agriculture on the mailo estate of Musazi’s father.21 However, Musazi imagined cooperatives and community development truly under African control, and he knew that to begin to enact that as a program of development was itself a subversive and revolutionary act: “The Union’s programme also aims at improving agriculture which would lead to better homes, better health, better recreation, the widening of intellectual horizons, the enrichment of rural life through music, drama and other forms of arts, and the revival of the old community spirit. With such a wide programme which apparently aims at revolutionising the social set-­up of the country, the Government saw real danger from the moment the Union’s activities began.”22 Nothing in that vision would have been unsettling for a colonial official if it had been elaborated by a Jeanes school principal. But the UAFU was a popular African organization that combined cooperative economics with mass politics and African-­focused community development, and that was threatening. Musazi’s focus on the politics of the farmers’ union frequently drew disapproval from experts and officials in the Colonial Office and in the Protectorate government. He even drew criticism from some allies. George Shepherd, the American adviser hired by Musazi to move to Uganda and advise the farmers, thought Musazi was “first of all a politician” who saw no distinction between a cooperative and a political party. Shepherd tried to convince Musazi that while “[a] political party can afford to expand infinitely . . . a co-­operative has to be built block upon block, slowly, if it is to succeed.” Shepherd believed that “to Ignatius’s mind, [the farmers’ union] was both a co-­operative and a movement of the peasants aimed at one preeminent goal—freedom for his people.”23

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Ultimately this negation of the boundary between economics and politics allowed the protocols and instruments of cooperative bookkeeping to function as significant political tools for the UAFU and its successor organization, the Federation. The ledgers that the Federation’s treasurer, Samuel Lukabi, pored over and meticulously amended at the group’s Katwe office were much more than lists of members owed dividends.24 The structure of the UAFU (which the Federation kept) allowed the society’s books to function as membership lists for a national political organization capable of communicating with and organizing members at the grassroots. The most local space was the group of ten to two hundred farmers, above which was a “headquarters” of from twenty to thirty groups. Multiple headquarters composed the districts that formed the Federation. Each level had officers who kept books and channeled their records into the main Katwe office.25 The meetings of the local constituent groups were spaces of political discussion where the knowledge of the link to the national, anti-­colonial cause would be continually reaffirmed. These were the radical spaces of the anti-­colonial cooperative movement in Uganda. One Colonial Office official described the “almost hectic” pace of growth of “the Cooperative Movement and of associations which have adopted the co-­operative label.”26 The explosion in the cooperative movement was largely due to the popular appeal of the political project of the UAFU/Federation. Boycott would be the movement’s most powerful tool. After harvest during the late months of 1948 and the early months of 1949, the UAFU collected members’ seed cotton and issued receipts for the deposits.27 In all, according to Musazi, twenty-­two million pounds of cotton were collected and placed in UAFU stores or in the homes of members.28 While they were looking forward to future seasons when they might buy their own ginnery, for 1949 the project was to starve the­ buyers and ginners of their cotton and to demand a major change in the way cotton moved through levels of the production process. Instead of selling their cotton to licensed buyers for what the farmers believed would be an untenable fraction of the world cotton price, they would seek to negotiate directly with ginners to have their cotton ginned. The UAFU would then petition government to allow them to sell their ginned cotton to buyers of their choice or to the marketing board. Finally, they planned to redistribute the proceeds from the sale of the crop to members according to the weight of their original deposits, minus a 5 percent cut to be fed back into UAFU operations (to maintain its Katwe offices, employ staff, purchase trucks, and organize the further buildup of the organization in Buganda and beyond). The reaction of Hall’s government to the UAFU boycott ensured that the politics of cotton production and marketing would be a major front in the escalating protest movement against British indirect rule. As Musazi related the events, it was “by the stroke of a pen” in mid-­March that Hall promulgated an ordinance banning the storage of seed cotton throughout Buganda from April through October (thus

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for the entire 1949 growing season). UAFU representatives met with the Kabaka at the end of March to plead against the new order. According to Musazi, the Kabaka agreed that the order was unjust and told the UAFU representatives to take their grievances to the governor, which Musazi took as “nothing short of an order that his people should strongly object to that Ordinance.”29 Mulumba, for his part, forged a rhetorical connection between the Bataka cause and the racially charged politics around cotton. He called on Ganda farmers to “rise up with the ghosts of our grandfathers. You are no longer children, no longer deceived by Indians—they hurt us—they cheat us—we shall also hurt them by not giving them our cotton.”30 Anti-Indian political rhetoric was common in the farmers’ movement in Uganda and in African nationalist politics elsewhere in East Africa. Idi Amin’s expulsion of South Asians from Uganda in 1972 casts a shadow backward onto the politics around cooperatives in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and so it is worth taking a moment here to recognize the ways in which race and nation were discursively entangled in the politics of decolonization in East Africa to help contextualize an unsettling ambivalence around racial nationalism in the Ugandan farmers’ movement. Some intellectual historians have recently emphasized that discourses of race and nation that underpinned late colonial and postcolonial political projects in East Africa were not imports of Western scientific racism and colonial categorizing nor primarily of Pan-­Africanist intellectual creation. Rather, they were generated from East African intellectual currents of racial thought and from local understandings of social relations between East African communities.31 Cooperatives and other forms of self-­help organization had different social uses and social meanings here. In Zanzibar in the 1950s there was a race between the Arab-­dominated Zanzibar National Party and the mainlander-­African Afro-­ Shirazi Party to start competing networks of cooperative shops. This was part of an escalating battle of exclusionary nationalisms that drew strength from a long intellectual history of racial thought on the Swahili coast and coastal islands.32 In Tanzania, as James Brennan argues, the Swahili concept of Taifa resembled ideas of nation but gained a racial-­exclusionary meaning primarily as it was formed against the local “constitutive ‘Other’ ” of Indians.33 Taifa was shaped through print public sphere debate as well as through people’s interactions within the economic circuits of the segregated city of Dar es Salaam, especially in the credit and debt relationships often mediated at the Indian duka (store).34 In early independence-­era Tanzania in the midst of the project of building Julius Nyerere’s program of ujamaa focused largely on cooperative farming, Indians were frequently identified as the new socialist nation’s “purge category” of “exploiter.” The “long-­standing discursive conflation of race and nation” culminated in 1971 with the nationalization of much of the real estate property of Indians in Dar es Salaam.35 There were “spontaneous celebrations across Tanzania” a year later when news broke of Amin’s expulsion order in Uganda.36

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Undoubtedly much of the populist energy in the UAFU/Federation was generated by a strong sense among farmers that they faced quotidian injustices as Africans navigating the “economic circuits” (to borrow Brennan’s term) involved in cash-­crop growing and marketing. The superimposed grid of colonial law over rural life put up racially defined barriers in the form of colonial cotton zoning rules (with ginning pools that included no Africans), coffee rules that defined African methods of curing as inferior, and a paternalistic cooperative law that treated African farmers like children in need of tutelage. The relationships mediated at the duka had their rural parallel in those forged at the cotton-­buying sites where Africans believed they were routinely cheated by both Indians and Europeans, but especially Indians. And yet for his part Musazi espoused multiracialism and sought allies among the Indian community of Uganda.37 He advocated Gandhian nonviolence and believed in human rights. At the same time, the rhetoric of Mulumba and Musazi mapped categories of exploiter-­exploited onto Uganda’s race relations. Musazi wrote that the purpose of the UAFU was to “improve the African economic position: first, by liquidating the middleman, i.e., the Indian— whose exploitation of the African has reached immeasurable dimensions.”38 T H E “D I S T U R BA N C E S” O F 1 9 4 9

Musazi and Mulumba were both in London at the time of the protests and disturbances of 1949 that would lead to the emergency declaration and collective punishment against Baganda that included the burning of UAFU cotton stores. The protest started on April 25 with a march to the Kabaka’s palace, the Lubiri, led especially by the Bataka Union. Once assembled the eight-­thousand-­strong crowd remained to support eight representatives of “all people and grandfathers of Buganda” as they presented a petition to the Kabaka that demanded democratic reforms and the ability to gin their own cotton and sell it to the world market on their own terms.39 Both inside and outside the Lubiri the farmers brought the problem of cash-­crop marketing into an anti-­colonial discourse about political bondage and despotism.40 Some in the crowd held up a banner showing hands “holding up ropes” to signify the willingness of the protesters to go to prison for their cause. The interpretation of the banner was delivered directly to the Kabaka by the farmers’ representative Eryeza Bwete from Kyadondo saza, which would soon be one of the “disturbed” counties ordered to receive collective punishment. Another representative, Gomeri Lwere, detailed for the Kabaka the problem of the government’s cooperative plan: People are not satisfied with the food they eat. They feed on bad food because they have no money. Uganda is now like Hitler’s Germany. We have come before you so that we may be imprisoned after we have said the truth. There is hypocrisy in the

120     Uganda’s Anti-­c olonial Cooperative Movement Cooperative Societies. The Cooperative Society fights for the wealth of the Europeans. The Europeans shows [sic] the Cooperative Societies how to prepare their Coffee properly. The poor men then given -­0/2 cents etcetra [sic]. They then sell their coffee to Europeans who sell the coffee at Sh. 3/-­getting a great deal of profit.41

Hall’s government was anticipating protests. Protectorate authorities had acquired the powers to license and ban any gathering of over five hundred people only the year before as part of the revision to the Police Ordinance in the wake of events in 1945. The crackdown on crowds and the licensing regime placed around political events fit the growing under-­siege mentality of the Protectorate administrative class, which was gearing up for a new era of counterinsurgency and colonial defense. In addition to requiring licenses for political rallies, the new rule made it an offense to address an unlicensed crowd that had grown beyond five hundred. This meant that when leaders addressed the crowd outside the palace, the police immediately moved in to arrest them and disperse the crowd.42 Over the next several days protests spread through much of Buganda, including acts of violence and destruction of property. The residences of some chiefs were torched, and their cattle were maimed. Indian-owned shops were looted. By the end of the “disturbances” 1,724 Africans had been arrested and 19 had been shot and killed by the police.43 Immediately the governor declared a state of emergency. Volunteer special constables were outfitted with steel helmets and truncheons and used to patrol residential areas.44 In the mostly Indian area of “Old Kampala,” residents organized “a regular system of night patrols looking after not only their own houses but also guarding well-­known Africans.”45 European and Indian residents of “isolated districts” came into Kampala seeking refuge. The Ismaili community opened up their rest house and Diamond Jubilee Hall to provide “shelter and sanctuary . . . for their brethren.”46 Emergency orders of some form were in place for most of the next two years. During this time the Protectorate government built up its police forces (especially its counterinsurgency Special Branch); carried out communal punishment by confiscating UAFU cotton crops; collected a punitive 6 Sh. cash tax on all Baganda in the twelve sazas (counties) that had been declared “Disturbed,” in order to pay for damaged property; and carried out a censorship and propaganda campaign to counter the anti-­imperial publications and circulated letters of the farmers and their allies in Uganda and Britain.47 The UAFU and the Bataka Union were both declared illegal societies in one of the first of the Hall government’s actions.48 From that moment both societies had to operate as underground, dissident networks. Their top leaders were either jailed, exiled, or in hiding for much of the next two years. Between 1949 and May 1951 Musazi was prohibited from residing in Buganda, spending this time either “rusticated” (deported) to an outlying northern district of Uganda or organizing for

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the farmers’ cause in London. The Protectorate government used the Deportation Law, the Press Censorship and Correction Ordinance, and a host of other legal instruments under the Emergency Powers Order in Council (1939) to combat the Bataka and the UAFU. Under the terms of the 1939 law, the governor had the ability to enact additional regulations once an emergency had been declared. Hall quickly declared new assembly and powers of detention regulations that vastly expanded police powers and limited the ability of protesters to gather even in small groups. Now any police officer above the rank of assistant inspector could remove any person from a township if the officer believed that person did not reside there. The new powers allowed the arrest of “any native” carrying a stick or any other object that an officer determined could be a weapon. Police now could disperse a group larger than five people, and so long as they first sounded a whistle in warning, they could fire on such a group. The emergency regulations also gave immunity from prosecution to any officer who might kill someone in such crowd control events.49 In spite of these powers, people continued to protest, especially around the jails where protesters were being held and the courthouses where cases related to the protests were being heard. D EV E L O P M E N T N E T WO R K S

At several points in this book I have looked at how British community development encompassed a project of rural communication that searched for pedagogies, rhetorics, and media technologies to reach the minds of colonial subjects (as with the mobile cinema experiments and mass education in chapter 2). Now I turn to development media in the context of postwar emergency rule and the politics of decolonization. Here media and the tools and techniques of publicity were used to wage counterinsurgency even as Ganda activists executed their own publicity strategy that stretched from Uganda to London. The colonial state in Uganda had for several years been building up its public information technologies, acquiring loudspeakers, projectors, printing presses, and mobile cinema vans. Before the war this technical expansion in rural communication was ostensibly intended to support campaigns to treat rural development as a project of public information and practical education, as explored in chapter 2. The war only amplified this movement, which was similar to what was going on in nearby Kenya in the several years leading up to the Mau Mau emergency. There the state’s community development plans placed all hopes on the “transformatory power of propaganda” deployed through a science of public information that had been honed during the war.50 As Uganda Protectorate officials confronted a farmers’ movement that deployed a compelling alternative vision of African-­led development that rejected state supervision and control, the government’s core publicity mission became one of

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affirming a positive role for the colonial state as the leader of successful development work. Hall’s government made the generation of positive publicity about the official cooperative movement a top priority (to be reinforced by negative publicity about the unregistered farmer cooperatives). And yet this was more than a battle of mere representation. There also was a struggle for control of the very rural communication channels initiated by rural development. The cooperative movement in these terms was intended as a component of a government-­controlled public information system, one that gained special access for the state in rural life. That was how Strickland advertised the system, and it was how Governor Hall envisioned it. Hall wrote in his preface to Worthington’s postwar development plan that the most immediate utility of cooperatives was that they would “provide a very useful channel of agricultural propaganda.”51 But now in the throes of what officials understood was a counterinsurgency campaign, propaganda went well beyond the state’s agricultural advice and instead had a clear political purpose to undermine the unregistered farmer cooperatives. Shepherd recalled Musazi, frustrated with “ ‘Government cooperative propagandists’ ” in Eastern Province (beyond the original Buganda base of the original UAFU) telling people there that the farmers’ union would steal their money if they joined.52 One of the best places to view the intersection of development publicity and emergency rule is in the work of the Ugandan Department of Public Relations and Social Welfare (DPRSW), another of the typical agencies of the postwar “Second Colonial Occupation” of Africa. DPRSW officials and staff believed their mission was to increase “the spirit of self-­help and an understanding of Government measures.”53 The DPRSW was at once responsible for overseeing the development of rural information systems and fielding demonstration teams to promote various projects of community development, though in 1952 it split its general propaganda and community development functions and formed two new departments, the Department of Information and the Department of Community Development. The DPRSW provided one of the comic ironies of development publicity under emergency rule: the agency whose essential mission it was to promote the state’s plans and accomplishments with cooperatives and community development played a key role in the negative publicity campaign against Buganda’s most popular cooperative and community development project, the UAFU/Federation.54 During and after the April “disturbances,” the DPRSW turned its mass education equipment into media for counterpropaganda against the Bataka and the UAFU.55 The DPRSW facilitated daily press conferences from the Resident’s Office and circulated daily print communiqués “as widely as possible throughout the disturbed areas,” working to get these into the hands of the press outlets inside and outside Uganda. The DPRSW’s seven operational mobile cinema vans were used for their loudspeaker equipment to make announcements on behalf of the commissioner of police.56 However, in practice, as Carol Summers argues, media

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in Uganda in the late colonial era were contested and prone to audience pushback and alternative uses. Mobile news vans roving the countryside and blasting government information often annoyed rural Ugandans. Moreover, Ugandan “information activists” proved to be adroit operators of new media as well as familiar Ganda techniques of publicity. They strategized about how to move their political messaging through networks in Uganda and in Britain.57 A special mode of ideological travel in Uganda was through song. Farmers of the UAFU possessed repertoires of songs of the cooperative movement. Some of these were written by Joyce Mukalisi, a leader of “the women’s section of the federation” who also was a typist for the UAFU. According to Shepherd, Mukalisi “composed several stirring songs dealing with the national struggle and the farmers’ movement.”58 The publicity arena in which the DPRSW operated straddled colony and metropole, not least because Musazi and Mulumba in exile in London operated their own publicity campaigns at a feverish pace. One strategy the Secretariat pursued, largely acting through DPRSW, was to coach the government in London through correspondence so that the department’s publicity points would be delivered as answers to questions in the House of Commons. The real target of this messaging was the Buganda public sphere. Ugandan officials hoped that the major East African and Ugandan papers would report on the parliamentary exchanges and thereby amplify the government’s take on unfolding events. One example was the effort to delegitimize the Bataka Union by portraying it as an inauthentic Ganda institution. In early September 1948 (about six months before the disturbances), the Ugandan government generated analysis for the Colonial Office that argued that the Bataka Union had little or no actual connection to the genuine Abataka clan heads and that it was a “mushroom political body.” At the Colonial Office Uganda’s DPRSW brief was crafted into an answer to a question put to Labour’s secretary of state for the colonies, the influential trade unionist Arthur Creech Jones.59 Creech Jones answered with the coached response even down to nearly the exact phrase; the Bataka was “a mushroom political party,” to which Jones added, based on other notes from Ugandan officials, that it was “unrepresentative of the great mass of Ugandan people.”60 The question and answer were reported in the East African Standard (a major Nairobi-­based, English-­language paper), and the phrase about the mushroom political party was repeated once again for public consumption in East Africa.61 Parliament was, however, a contested publicity arena, and the strategic distribution of questions was a common tactic. On colonial issues it was a tactic used by Labour and Conservative policy committees like Labour’s Fabian Colonial Bureau and the Conservative Imperial Affairs Committee.62 Outside pressure groups also urged parliamentary questions on sympathetic MPs.63 Ganda activists were also able to operate in this arena with the assistance of allies in Parliament, placing questions strategically in Commons debate to reinforce their activism in Uganda as the contest with the state shifted to new fronts. For instance, while in Uganda

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the Federation lobbied for changes to the coffee rules that prohibited Africans from growing and curing higher-­priced coffee, they got their allies in Parliament to ask questions about race and unequal pricing in Uganda’s coffee industry.64 Musazi’s and Mulumba’s contacts in Parliament came out of friendships and collaborations they formed with activists of the British anti-­colonial Left. Musazi in particular formed strong alliances with members of the cooperative movement and the Cooperative Party and with MPs in the Labour Party and the Independent Labour Party.65 The most important relationship here was the close friendship formed between Musazi and MP Fenner Brockway. Brockway was a towering figure on the British Left from the interwar era through the 1970s. He was a longtime member and leader of the Independent Labour Party and was hugely influential in shaping anti-­colonial activism in Britain. Brockway and Musazi met at a moment when Brockway and others were forming the Congress of Peoples Against Colonialism, a pressure group that would evolve into the Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF). The group agitated to call attention to liberation struggles and the violence and repression done by Britain and other imperial powers, and, notably, the MCF would be a key organization in Britain drawing together momentum against apartheid in South Africa and in support of the boycott campaign in the late 1950s. As we will see in the next chapter, members of the political committees of the larger British cooperative societies were often involved in the MCF’s activist work, and societies passed resolutions to ally with the organization. Brockway was convinced that cooperatives of a truly democratic nature (which he, like Musazi, contrasted with the official cooperative movement of the colonial state) held the key to development in Africa as well as a chance to avoid a violent end of empire. For his part, Mulumba, speaking for the Bataka, made contacts among Soviet diplomats, whom he hoped would bring the problem of the evolving plans for closer union and the threat of land alienation to debate in the United Nations. While in London Musazi and Mulumba interacted with anti-­colonial activists from Africa and the Caribbean.66 The men appeared together at London events such as a meeting of the Coloured Workers’ Association of Great Britain, where they shared the speakers’ platform with, among others, Trinidad’s influential labor leader Uriah Butler. In 1937 Butler had organized a massive strike of oil workers in Trinidad, to which panicked British rulers responded with emergency powers and a violent crackdown.67 Musazi and Mulumba also came into contact with the influential Trinidadian Pan-­Africanist writer George Padmore. Padmore was a Marxist and deeply committed to African liberation. He had been the Comintern’s expert on colonial peoples before being expelled from the Communist Party in 1934 for objecting to the party’s retreat from its anti-­colonial commitments. He would later serve as an adviser to Ghana’s socialist president Kwame Nkrumah.68 At the time Musazi and Mulumba knew him in London, Padmore was in the middle of writing his scathing condemnation of British colonialism, Africa: Britain’s Third

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Empire (1949), in which he called out the duplicity of all the postwar talk in ­Britain about colonial development. Against arguments in vogue then about how the empire was on a new footing, committed to the formation of a commonwealth based on imperial partnership and development, Padmore argued that in Africa the British remained the masters of the same old empire of domination. Faced with the loss of India, he argued, British politicians had become obsessed about “Colonial Development and Welfare” in its African territories, but this only masked a “new Economic Imperialism” that aimed to extract African resources and enlist African armies in the global fight against communism.69 Padmore endorsed cooperatives as the necessary basis for the development of Africa, but he meant something very different than the program Labour’s Colonial Office was putting into place.70 Padmore wanted cooperatives in Africa to be the harbinger of a post-­imperial socialist economy and socialist citizenship, and he saw the colonial system itself standing in the way.71 He included discussion of Uganda’s Bataka movement and government repression in his 1949 book (which would soon be banned in Uganda, Gold Coast, Gambia, Kenya, and Tanganyika Territory).72 Padmore also wrote an article about the Uganda events for the magazine Du Bois had started, The Crisis, that reads like it may have been informed by conversations with Musazi or Mulumba or both. In it he denounced the restrictions on free speech, the deportations, and other elements of the Protectorate’s emergency campaign, as well as the red-­baiting of Governor Hall and Labour’s Creech Jones in the Colonial Office. He mocked Hall for seeing “ ‘agents of the Kremlin’ ” behind the “Bataka—the traditional Elders of the Buganda Clans, an institution which forms an integral part of the social structure of the Uganda nation.”73 Another important activist project that Musazi and Mulumba took on together was to form the African League along with several other London-­based African dissidents. The League’s motto was “Freedom for Africa,” and it published a paper, The African Arrow. Mulumba was the League’s secretary general and Musazi its treasurer. They accepted full members who were African and associate members who were of African descent. Mulumba wrote a letter of invitation to would-­be members and associates that served as the preamble to the League’s Constitution. He used the document to draw attention to the intimate relationship of domination that existed between British metropolitan consumers and Africa’s dispossessed and exploited subjects, mediated through commodities. The League only wanted members who “know and believe that the Africans are the rightful owners of the land and all the raw materials of Africa . . are aware that ‘Every household in Britain uses colonial products’ . . . [and] are at all indignant against the savage suppression and the inhuman enslavement of African peoples by foreigners.”74 Though not able to be members, non-­Black British allies were welcome at meetings. Brockway gave a speech along with Musazi and Mulumba at the League’s first rally in Trafalgar Square in August 1949, which was entirely dedicated to

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events concerning the Ugandan situation. According to the police spy at the rally, Brockway told the crowd that all Labour Party members, cooperators, and trade unionists needed to support “ ‘the people of Uganda in their struggle against imperialism in its most vicious form.’ ”75 The African League’s activities were hardly reported in the British press. But in Uganda, news of the Trafalgar Square rally got big billing. It stretched across three columns of newsprint in the Uganda Herald, with the League’s Uganda-­focused demand as a headline: “ ‘RECALL THE GOVERNOR.’ ”76 The DPRSW worked to counter the news generated in Uganda about the successes of Musazi and Mulumba in raising awareness in London about the farmers’ struggle. Responding to a recently published letter by Musazi in which he touted the African League’s Trafalgar Square march and rally, the DPRSW wrote its own article to push to “all the vernacular press.” It was clearly based on the police report sent to officials in Entebbe from London. The article was called “The Truth Will Out.” It sought to minimize and mock the Trafalgar event: the rally had drawn only 40 of the “nearly 3,500 colonial students now in Great Britain,” and only a total of 300 protesters were counted when speeches at Trafalgar Square “often attracted crowds of 3,000 people.” The article also dropped a hint of communistic association with the event, pointing out (as apparently was remarked by a speaker at the rally, too) that the only paper to send a reporter was a “Communist paper” (the Daily Worker).77 One of the most important advantages Musazi and Mulumba had was their ability from their position of exile in London to write political commentary in English and Luganda without fear of arrest. This was an immense frustration for Ugandan officials, who would have preferred to silence the sources of Bataka and UAFU propaganda rather than continue to try in vain to stop their distribution through the multitude of uncontrollable information channels throughout Uganda. Officials considered these texts to be some of the greatest threats to the colonial order. Mulumba’s letters were considered the more severe threat. In the opinion of the architects of the Protectorate’s publicity campaign, there could be no greater propaganda victory in Uganda against the Bataka movement than to be able to announce a conviction of Mulumba in London on sedition charges.78 Ugandan officials never succeeded here, though it was not for lack of trying. In May 1949 the Ugandan solicitor-­general traveled to London and met with officials from Scotland Yard, MI5, the Post Office, the Colonial Office, and the Director of Public Prosecutions in an attempt to coordinate a strategy to stop the writings of Mulumba and Musazi. The Ugandan government was disappointed. They could rely on government and police collaborators in London for intelligence on the activities of Musazi and Mulumba, providing spies at their rallies and interception of their mail. However, there was little that could be done to halt the production of the Ganda activists’ political texts so long as they did not cross the legal definition of sedition in England. The public prosecutor did not agree with the Ugandan

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government that Mulumba’s written admonition to Baganda to “not mind the guns of the police” amounted to sedition under English law. Scotland Yard Special Branch officers also looked for anything incriminating on Musazi, even searching his London residence, but found no seditious texts.79 British laws protecting political speech and press freedom allowed more leeway for Mulumba and Musazi to write from London, but as soon as their texts reached the hands of collaborators in Uganda, those people were targeted by police. It was once again the space of emergency rule, and the government vigorously applied the sedition law to police the information channels of the farmers’ movement. Those found guilty of printing and distributing seditious texts typically received prison sentences with hard labor.80 Mulumba wrote in one of his letters (meant for wide circulation) that it was clear now that the 1900 Agreement stank. The sedition law was the “damp blanket . . . thrown over the Bataka” in an attempt to “smother the stench.”81 Ganda activists looked for what breathing room they could find under the smothering sedition law. An example is the case of Festo Kibuka Musoke. He was, according to Uganda Police Special Branch, “by far the most dangerous man at large in Buganda today” because of the rhetorical power of the anonymous, seditious texts he was suspected of authoring. However, it appears Musoke was able to evade prosecution by composing his texts outdoors on a typewriter he kept hidden “under a clump of trees” near his house (rather than keeping the typewriter or the texts in his home, where they might have incriminated him during one of several police searches).82 But this skillful evasion did not matter. Emergency powers gave tremendous latitude to the governor to arrest someone even on mere suspicion of sedition or distribution of seditious information. Under these p ­ owers Musoke was detained and held for a week without charge while authorities prepared for an expected new wave of protests (fittingly the protests were against the unjust detention and prosecution of Bataka and UAFU leaders).83 Mere suspicion was also used to arrest UAFU secretary Samuel Lukabi outside the post office the moment he received an envelope containing Musazi’s printed response to the Kingdon Commission of Inquiry’s report on the April disturbances.84 Brockway picked up the story of Lukabi’s political persecution, excoriating the colonial secretary in a letter for allowing a situation in which someone could be arrested on charges of sedition simply for being the recipient of a letter: “I need not point out how distasteful such a practice is to British minds and how much we regret that it should be carried out in a British colony.”85 In spite of the intense police environment, throughout the emergency period the UAFU and Bataka Union continued to organize in secret. At gatherings people still shouted the Bataka slogan “BU” (pronounced “Boo,” for Bataka Uganda). The farmers continued to build up the membership base of their illegal cooperative union. The ability of the UAFU to build its organization while outlawed amazed

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Brockway when he visited for two weeks at the end of August 1950, more than a year after the ban was issued: It is said that Africans cannot organize. I have never experienced such elaborate and efficient organization as this underground society put on for my visit. Its executive members—those who escaped prison—have been hiding in the jungle. They came out for the first time to meet me. Yet somehow they not only planned my tour throughout Uganda, but had actually constructed meeting-­places for the occasion in twenty far-­distant centres: carpeted platforms backed and covered by woven rushes, auditoriums sometimes as large as football pitches roofed by banana leaves stretched over criss-­cross frames of bamboos.86

In fact the platforms had been built originally with the idea that Musazi would be speaking from them along with Brockway. This was to have marked Musazi’s return from London, as he planned to defy the emergency order that barred him from entering Buganda. At the last minute Brockway prevailed upon Musazi to stay in London, after hearing reports that authorities planned to arrest and deport Musazi should he return. Apparently officials had interpreted the construction of platforms as a security threat, believing the rallies would spark a new wave of disturbances.87 Brockway went ahead on his own to visit and consulted with the farmers in August 1950. When he returned to London, Brockway wrote a “Report on Uganda” that he sent to Secretary of State for the Colonies James Griffiths. In his report Brockway deplored the actions of Hall’s government in barring Musazi and Mulumba and maintaining a ban on the UAFU and “Bataka Party.” He challenged the Ugandan government’s conduct during the emergency, likening it to the draconian “Black and Tan regime” in Ireland around the time of the Easter Rebellion in 1916. He called attention to the gulf between the findings of the government’s official commission of inquiry and the view from the perspective of Baganda: “I saw the same burned farms and store-­houses and heard the same stories of those who were injured and killed. . . . I was also told of how prisoners were taken from lorries at the crossroad villages and beaten publicly in order to intimidate the people. I heard this from a responsible European as well as from Africans.”88 Brockway also observed that the brutality of the emergency and the intense degree of political repression had produced deep skepticism about all the Protectorate’s rural development staff: “The Government was the enemy. Everything it ordered had to be resisted.” It reminded him of the “psychology” of the resistance movement in France during the Nazi occupation.89 D E C O L O N I Z I N G U G A N DA’ S C O O P E R AT I V E L AW

In January 1951 Musazi defied orders and attempted to return to Buganda. He was immediately arrested, and Hall threatened him with deportation. Hall, in what he

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suggested was a merciful gesture, decided to “rusticate” Musazi to the remote border of Uganda and Sudan instead of exiling him again to Britain. Musazi’s allies in Parliament protested this internal exile. Against arguments from the Ugandan government that Musazi posed a continued security threat, Brockway defended him in a parliamentary speech, pledging that he knew him like a brother and that Musazi’s only desire was “to build the farmers’ organization on a constructive and co-­operative basis.” There was “not an atom of violence or vengeance in him.”90 After three months of rustication Musazi was finally allowed to return to Buganda in March 1951. Hall was soon on his way out as governor, replaced in January 1952 by the Colonial Office official Andrew Cohen. In the words of John Stonehouse, one of the Brockway-­recruited advisers to the farmers, this meant that there now was a “Fabian in Government House.”91 Hall and Cohen had strikingly different approaches when it came to dealing with the independent cooperative movement. Whereas Hall seemed to operate on the belief that resistance to colonial authority over rural associations needed to be met by shows of strength and official resolve, Cohen was much more willing to negotiate with the farmers and to offer significant concessions. By the time of Musazi’s return to Buganda, the banned UAFU was in the process of splitting into several organizations. One organization to emerge was the Uganda African Growers, which was led by Mr. Kabanda, an ally of Mulumba (who was himself still in London). The larger of the new organizations descended from the original UAFU was led by Musazi and now called itself the Federation of Partnerships of the Ugandan African Farmers. The Federation registered under the Business Names Ordinance, which gave it a legal standing even if it continued to frustrate officials for keeping a large section of the farmer groups outside the official cooperative movement.92 It is not clear whether the split in the UAFU signified any major shift in the ideological allegiances among the membership. The broad-­based support for the Bataka movement meant that both groups certainly had many members who believed in restoring clans and clan heads to a prominent place in an imagined postcolonial political order. It also is unclear what caused the split between Musazi and Mulumba. They worked together for much of their time in London, but by the time of his return to Buganda Musazi clearly believed the Federation was in competition with Mulumba and Kabanda and the government for cooperative members. Perhaps the rift was the result of some personal animosity that developed while Mulumba and Musazi were in London; these are guesses, but it is possible, too, that it was over ideology, tactics, or Mulumba’s contacts with Soviet diplomats in London (Musazi often worried that accusations of communist connections would fatally damage the political organizations he helped to found; see the discussion later about the rifts in the Uganda National Congress). There is much less documentation on the Mulumba-­aligned groups, and it appears that the Federation was more successful at recruiting new members. In

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April 1951 Acting Cooperatives Registrar J. W. Ross told Surridge, the Colonial Office adviser on colonial cooperation, that the Federation seemed to be outpacing the Mulumba-­led groups in membership and that the Federation claimed around forty thousand members (which Ross thought was exaggerated). This was roughly the same number of individual farmers Ross claimed had enrolled in the state-­ supervised system.93 By mid-­1952 the Federation, according to John Stonehouse, claimed to have eighty thousand members throughout Uganda, which matched the UAFU’s pre-­emergency strength.94 In this period the Federation also recruited a succession of British, American, and European advisers. First, in January 1950, was Diane Noakes of the London branch of Brockway’s Congress of Peoples Against Imperialism. Noakes helped to maintain the Federation’s books and to arrange ginning contracts with Indian ginnery owners. She and Musazi had a falling out shortly after his return, and she went on to work with a smaller, breakaway cooperative group, Abalimi Limited. The nature of the disagreement between Noakes and Musazi is not entirely clear. She resigned from the Congress of Peoples Against Imperialism over the incident. In her resignation letter to Brockway she described the falling out, but she held back some details. Clearly a personal animus had developed between her and Musazi, at least partly shaped by a disagreement over the specific organizing directions toward which Musazi wanted to take the Federation after his return. While the Federation petitioned the government to change its racially restrictive marketing rules, it appears Musazi wanted to go around the restrictions and seek buyers for the farmers’ produce in Nairobi. Musazi may have viewed the prospect of this illicit trading as a relatively safe way to apply additional pressure on the government while delivering on the Federation’s promise to its members to find ways through the barriers to achieve a good price for their produce. Noakes, though, was adamant that the Federation must not transgress the marketing laws. Apparently there also was disagreement between Noakes and several of the Federation’s directors over the strategy to immediately raise funds to purchase a ginnery to process the members’ seed cotton, a strategy Noakes argued against on the grounds that it would be uneconomic given the caps that the cotton zoning rules placed on the amount of cotton any one ginnery could legally process.95 When she later had to edit the story of her departure to fit her curriculum vitae, Noakes explained more simply that she left the Federation because it was not able to work on orthodox lines.96 Musazi next recruited the American George Shepherd, who was completing his PhD in political science at the London School of Economics. He would play a key role in shaping the Federation’s strategy when it came to petitioning colonial authorities for changes to the marketing rules and the cooperative law. Overlapping with Shepherd and staying on after he left was John Stonehouse, a cooperatives enthusiast who also had studied at LSE (under Laski) and would go on after

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his time in Uganda to be a Cooperative Party MP and also president of the London Cooperative Society. Stonehouse stayed in Uganda until mid-­1954, and among other activities he gave classes on cooperative principles and helped organize maize marketing within the Federation. When he arrived in Uganda he told the Uganda Herald that “the only authentic [because democratic] cooperative movement in Uganda is that which has been and is being developed independently of Government control.” He wanted to help connect this democratic movement in Uganda to the cooperative movement in Britain and Europe.97 Finally, the Italian agricultural scientist Dr. Roger Cazziol also joined the Federation during the same period. Cazziol was to oversee the Federation’s model cooperative farm on Musazi’s father’s land.98 During the last year of Hall’s rule and Cohen’s first year in office, the political activities of the Federation turned toward pressuring the Protectorate government to eliminate racial discrimination in the coffee and cotton marketing rules and to fundamentally transform the cooperative law. Previous chapters have shown how important the spatial embedding of cooperative associations was to colonial authorities and to their cooperatives experts. This was the case stretching back to the Indian Civil Service (ICS) system. The cooperative law required societies to have a physical address at which their registration documents (which cost a fee to acquire) could be inspected by the public. This branded the space of the cooperative with a symbol of the colonial authority’s mandate to govern there. After Musazi’s return, the next campaign of the Ganda farmers’ union (now working with advisers recruited by Brockway) sought to decolonize this state-­purposed political space by dismantling the paternalistic controls of Uganda’s 1946 Cooperative Law through political pressure on the government in Entebbe and on the Colonial Office. Their message to authorities (which one of their leaders, Peter Ssonko, apparently delivered personally to Acting Registrar Ross during a conversation) was that members of their unregistered cooperatives were the “true co-­operators.” Ross dismissed the claim. He believed Ssonko, like Musazi, was just jealously guarding the power given to him by his “ ‘directorship’ ” (which Ross mockingly put in quotes). That, he believed, was the real reason Ssonko was opposed to registration.99 In fact the Registrar was one of the main reasons many farmers continued to resist registration. The office of the Registrar epitomized the invasive power of the colonial state to intervene in the inner workings of a cooperative. Under the law, if the farmer groups of the Federation were to join the official cooperative movement, then the Registrar would have the power, if he wished, to appoint a manager to replace Musazi and the Federation directors. There was nothing to stop this power from being used as a weapon to attack the Federation as a political organizing force by seizing control of its offices and books and reorganizing its rural network of farmer groups, which by 1951 extended beyond Buganda to Toro

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and Busoga and Mbale in Eastern Province.100 In Musazi’s view, so long as the Registrar continued to hold his power to veto society bylaws and alter the composition of societies’ officers and staff, then the movement could not pretend to be democratic.101 Musazi was not alone in his distrust of the governmental machinery of the British cooperative system. Rank-­and-­file members of the Federation and other unregistered farmer groups had a highly tuned sense of the forms of colonial rule lurking behind the state’s rural development bureaucracies. UAFU and Federation members had particularly bad experiences with the personnel of the Cooperative Department, many of whom the farmers thought were bullies.102 The advantage promised with registration was that by entering the state machinery, cooperative assistants would be able to teach principles of cooperation. But some members of the Federation saw this help as a dangerous infiltration of their movement. Peter Salongo emphatically warned fellow members of the Federation: “The Government, like the leopard, will never change its spots. It may hide in sheep’s clothing, but it will not change. If we allow the co-­operative assistants to enter our groups, they will betray us and destroy us. The British wish only the destruction of our federation as they know it is the one organization which stands for freedom for Africans.”103 State archives reveal the panic in Entebbe and in the Colonial Office in London about the continued holdout of the Federation. One Colonial Office official recognized the back-­to-­the-­wall position the Federation had created for the new governor: “In going all out to persuade the Federation and similar organizations to come within the umbrella of the co-­operative movement Uganda have had to take bold steps” to solve an entwined economic and political dilemma in the colony. Others in the Colonial Office disagreed.104 There was great resistance in the Protectorate government and in the Colonial Office to the idea of relinquishing the supervisory powers entailed in registration. After all, the past two years had seemed to prove the colonial orthodoxy that cooperatives were dangerous unless they were supervised. The government commission appointed to study the obstacles facing the official cooperative movement found that “there would have been no disturbances in 1949 in Uganda if the Ganda farmers had been properly organized in co-­operative groups, and thus not have become the easy prey of malicious politicians who preyed on their fears and ignorance.”105 With the return of Musazi and the expansion of independent cooperative unions in and beyond Buganda, the major conversations at the Secretariat in Entebbe concerned how to draw down the membership of these politicized organizations by convincing members to join the official cooperative movement instead. An important part of the evolving strategy hinged on presenting cooperative registration as the access point to new sources of credit. Convinced that rural debt and low access to credit helped to foment peasants’ grievances—an old and easily transportable argument of British colonial regimes’ own in-­house rural sociology dating back to

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late nineteenth-­century India—the Kingdon Commission on the Buganda disturbances of 1949, recommended that government speed up plans to establish a land bank that could provide low-­interest loans to African farmers, lending especially to cooperatives. While the state had for two years used coercive measures to undermine the UAFU/Federation, what eventually emerged as the Credit and Savings Bank was meant to lure farmers away from the “Musazi groups” with the promise of credit. The Ugandan government would fund the bank with £500,000 diverted from the cotton and coffee price control funds.106 The price control funds accumulated the profits each year made from the difference between prices paid to farmers for their crops and the prices received by the board on the world market. These funds were themselves objects of farmers’ protests, seen by many as mechanisms to further cheat the farmers out of a fair price for their crops. The Bank of India was enlisted to act as the state’s agent, using its offices and staff to conduct Credit and Savings Bank business. Individual farmers and especially cooperatives were encouraged to apply for loans, which could only be given to Africans. But there was a catch: if cooperative groups wanted access to bank loans, they would have to register with the Cooperative Department.107 The bank promised credit but only to those farmers who renounced the independence movement that was catching fire inside the independent cooperative unions. From the start plans for the bank were shaped by the ongoing political crisis and by the struggle for control of the cooperative movement, showing once again that British rural development flowed as much from the immediate requirements of colonial crisis as from any long-­range plans or grand theory of economic development. We can plot the earliest discussion about the “land bank” idea from the several months before the April 1949 disturbances. This was a time of UAFU agitation about the racially restrictive ginning, buying, and marketing system and the start of talk about the boycott. Before the April 1949 “disturbances” and emergency, the land bank scheme was discussed by officials in Entebbe, but there was not yet any draft legislation, and there was not yet any consultation with the Colonial Office about how to approach such a system. Shortly following the April events, and with the Kingdon Commission’s encouragement, the provision of rural credit suddenly became an urgent question of security. Legislation to create the Credit and Savings Bank was quickly drafted (so quickly that Colonial Office officials complained to each other that the Ugandan government had left them no time to properly consult).108 Protectorate officials tried to present the land bank as the colonial state’s recognition of Africans’ needs and their greater political maturity, but the structure of the bank and its governance showed that officials were determined to maintain paternalistic control. The Colonial Office advised that the bank’s board of directors should be under the control of official members representing several key government departments, including the Cooperative Department. However,

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officials believed that “political considerations” demanded that the bank at least appear to be both African focused and African controlled. To manage this officials designed the rules for membership on the bank’s ten-­person board of directors so that the majority of the governor-­appointed unofficial members would be government-­friendly managers of the Kampala branches of the Bank of India, Barclays DC&O, and the Standard Bank of South Africa. The unofficial members, including at least two Africans, would outnumber the official government members seven to three (a public relations victory in securing the appearance of greater democracy), but Protectorate officials were confident that the three bank managers could “be regarded as official members for the purpose of the controlled and orderly conduct” of the bank. The government position would always prevail, and yet the “de jure unofficial majority on the Board” would provide “ready answer to political malcontents.”109 The fact that the polarizing Cooperatives Registrar was one of the statutory official members seems to have made the bank even more controversial for Ganda farmers. Farmers feared that this new role would amplify the power of the Registrar by allowing him to act as a gatekeeper of rural credit. He might use this power to prejudice the bank against a society seeking a loan.110 He could do this by simply advising that it was not a sound cooperative because of a failure to meet some cooperative principle (whether something from the original code of Rochdale or from the number of paternalist revisions made by the ICS).111 The board also had the power to call in a loan from a cooperative society at any time. This would have been a frightening prospect already for precarious farmers, but it would have been exacerbated by their awareness of the Registrar, with his enhanced vision of the state of their societies through his rural inspectorate, looming over their bank loans. With his hands on the levers of credit, the Registrar had the power to make or break a society. One approach to persuading the unregistered groups to come into the official movement was to appeal to Musazi through his allies. In the year before he was appointed to replace Hall as governor, Cohen was very much involved in this effort, taking part in deliberations about how to persuade Brockway to cooperate and meeting with Noakes before she left for Uganda to work as an adviser to the Federation. Cohen’s purpose in speaking with Noakes was to convince her that “the Uganda co-­operative legislation is sound” and to urge her to use her influence to persuade Musazi and other leaders of the Federation to join the official cooperative movement.112 Such efforts at enlisting Federation allies failed, not least because Brockway, as lead organizer of the London-­based support effort for the farmers, agreed that the details of the cooperative law in Uganda rendered it an undemocratic movement.113 Reinforcing the publicity work of the Federation to brand the cooperative law as undemocratic, Ganda activists focused their attention on how to force reforms

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to the cooperative law to make registration compatible with the autonomous political direction of their movement. This could only happen by dismantling the power of the Registrar. A pivotal moment came in early 1952 with the Dreschfield Commission on the Cooperative Movement, which focused on Masaka and Mengo Districts in Buganda and Busoga District in Eastern Province. Its mandate was to study and report on the rise of cooperative groups and the degree of the government’s progress or failure in registering these under the 1946 Cooperatives Ordinance, and to discover why some groups either would not or could not register. In addition, the commission was to use its findings to recommend changes to the 1946 cooperative law and to the state’s cooperative system in order to encourage all genuine cooperatives to register.114 The Dreschfield Commission met between March and May 1952, and once again the Federation mobilized its rural network of activist-­members. From multiple angles the UAFU/Federation shaped the information coming in front of the commission. The Federation sent members to attend its meetings, prepping the farmers beforehand with briefings about the details of the undemocratic provisions in the Cooperative Law. Federation officers had members at the ready to ask questions and make specific complaints about the difficulties they faced under the racist and monopolistic terms of Protectorate marketing law. Federation members focused their anger on the democracy deficit in the official Cooperative Movement. In hearings before the commission the farmers made points like, “We want to elect our own officers,” and “No more bullying by Cooperative inspectors,” and “Co-­ops should set our own policies.115 Meanwhile, Shepherd and Musazi used the Federation’s mimeograph machine to make copies of their memorandum to the government on the cooperative law and distributed these to the members of the commission.116 The fact that the Dreschfield Commission’s report and Cohen’s legislative action in response so strongly took the side of the Federation shows just how effective the latter’s activism was, and it also shows how elevated was the sense of crisis for officials as the state confronted the farmers’ movement. The commission concluded that the widespread feeling of distrust of the Cooperative Department meant that the best path forward would be to extricate the government’s mechanisms of control of the movement altogether (in other words, to basically dismantle cooperative rule). It recommended a series of changes to the 1946 law that amounted to an almost total negation of the Registrar’s control over societies. The commissioners argued that the office of the Registrar should be abolished and new roles should be forged for administrators, whose only task would be to publicize and encourage the movement and to register societies. The commission singled out the Federation and argued that the Registrar should not be allowed to put up any “technical difficulties” in the way of “big associations like the Federation of Partnerships in being allowed to register and keep within its fold its present groups.”117

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Much to the surprise of Colonial Office officials and the farmers alike, Cohen endorsed almost every aspect of Dreschfield’s report and recommendations and introduced a bill to revamp the cooperative law. Cohen also had recently instructed that a new community development training center be built (modeled on the Kabete Jeanes school) that would offer, as part of its range of community training activities, a course targeted to regular members of cooperatives.118 In a published memorandum responding to the commission’s report and announcing the new cooperatives legislation, the government of Uganda pointed to its priority that the competing movements be forged together “as a single co-­operative movement working together for the benefit of the country,” recognizing that the only way to achieve this was to democratize the structure of legal cooperation.119 The government rejected the long-­held orthodoxy of cooperatives experts in the Colonial Office and colonial Cooperative Departments that stretched back to the paternalistic approach of the ICS. African cooperatives should have the same independence that cooperatives enjoyed in Britain and elsewhere. Cohen abolished the Office of Registrar and replaced it with the Co-­operative Council, composed of elected cooperative members and appointed businessmen. There still would be a Cooperative Department, and an official would hold the office of chairman of the Co-­operative Council (the title “Registrar” was clearly too damaged to use even with stripped powers), but his ability to interfere in the operation of societies or to challenge the decisions of the mostly African Council would be minimal. If he feared that actions were being taken that might hurt the movement, his only recourse would be to appeal to the governor.120 This power could not be routinized easily in governmental practice, as the verdicts of an autonomous Registrar could be. In addition to dramatic changes to the law, Cohen also announced that the government was going to compulsorily purchase ginneries and lease them to African-­registered cooperatives that could raise one-­third of the cost. As with the Credit and Savings Bank, this was discussed straightforwardly inside the government as an action to persuade members of the Federation to register. In communicating his plan to the Colonial Office, Cohen could not anticipate what would happen if the Federation decided not to enroll. The ginneries were acquired from the price control funds, which all of Uganda’s cotton growers had (involuntarily) contributed to when they sold their cotton. Cohen admitted in a letter to Philip Rogers in the Colonial Office that if the Federation was not enrolled in a year, then the government might have to concede purchasing rights to nonregistered cooperatives or face overwhelming pressure.121 There was no question it was the Federation’s pressure that had forced Cohen’s hand in revamping the cooperative law. Cohen argued that to not change the law would allow a “dangerous competition” with the official cooperative movement and risk a repeat of the disturbance of April 1949.122 I pause here to appreciate what an extraordinary event this was in the life course of the colonial cooperative system I have tracked in this book. For the

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first time organized opposition had defeated, in a single territory, the principle of colonial difference that lay at the heart of British colonial cooperative theory, practice, and law: that the need for healthy cooperative growth required colonial authority before democracy. The news of Cohen’s action was received as a deep blow in the Colonial Office and in the Cooperative Department in Uganda. The officials in the Colonial Office who dealt with the Uganda cooperatives problem expressed frustration with Cohen (who did not consult the Colonial Office when he made the decision to overhaul the cooperative law). Surridge was annoyed and alarmed. He argued the change could have disastrous consequences for cooperative development in Uganda and could undermine the official cooperative movement in other colonies. In his view Federation farmers’ complaints about an interventionist and controlling Registrar were not credible but were pushed forward by pressure from Musazi and Brockway, and in Surridge’s own recent tour of Uganda and visits to cooperative societies there he had heard no complaints of Registrar misrule. Surridge thought the real problem was that Musazi failed to grasp the essence of cooperation: “a faith and a business.” Cohen was proposing to “withdraw many of the safeguards in the Co-­operative legislation in order to admit Mr. Musazi and others who have no faith in Co-­operation, no business sense and want to use cooperation for political purposes.”123 The Ugandan Registrar, Andrew Kerr, complained to the Ugandan chief secretary that the Dreschfield Commission had been duped by “insidious propaganda” by agitators with roots in the “Bataka Party” and UAFU/Federation. He also suggested Brockway might have Communist sympathies.124 Ross, who had been Acting Registrar while Kerr was on leave during the previous months, wrote Surridge to explain that the “attitude here is that no effort should be spared to bring into the co-­operative fold the misguided peasantry” who were supposed to be loyal to the Federation.125 The Federation’s directors were overjoyed at the news of their victory.126 Musazi convened a membership meeting in Kampala of more than two hundred representatives of groups from all over Uganda. Musazi argued that the constituent groups of the Federation should start to register under the revamped cooperative ordinance. When they voted at the end of the two-­day meeting, the farmers endorsed Musazi’s position. But some did argue against registration. However, Stonehouse, who attended the meeting and heard most of the speeches through an interpreter, recalled a turning point when a young farmer “with an oratory which surpassed that of even the usually eloquent Baganda” rose to speak. Stonehouse picked up only fragments: “I was unable to follow it all as my translator himself was so moved that I could only pick up odd sentences here and there. In effect what the young farmer said was that for years FUAF [the Federation] had been planting seeds of discontent because of the Government’s measures against co-­ operative farmers. But now the plants had grown and bore fruit, a beautiful crop

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which all could enjoy. Now it was the opportunity for those who had worked so hard in spreading the seeds to reap the harvest of reward.”127 C O O P E R AT I V E S AT T H E E N D O F E M P I R E

When officials in the Colonial Office promoted cooperatives with new determination after World War II, they dreamed they would evolve into a system of efficient, scientific agricultural production and distribution. The inner workings of that system would require benevolent British expertise and legal control to ensure its steady and safe (that is to say, nonpolitical) progress. They also imagined the proliferation of spaces that could inculcate business sense and foster forms of group decision-­making that would mimic participatory democracy. Cooperatives were to be schoolhouses for the idealized Commonwealth subject, whose economic and political development would grow slowly through British guidance. Throughout Britain’s decolonizing empire in the 1950s cooperatives remained officials’ favorite community development technology. But as anti-­colonial movements grew, it was clear that in many places cooperatives were part of the contested ground of struggle. Often the situation was shaped by the ideological and geopolitical contexts of the Cold War. This was true in Cyprus and Malaya, two places with cooperative laws and bureaucratic structures dating back several decades but where emergency rule in defense of empire upended the normal workings of law for long stretches of the 1950s. In both cases dissident movements tried to enlist cooperatives as tools in a larger anti-­colonial struggle.128 Cooperatives in Uganda did not follow the prescribed path either. Instead they became radical spaces of anti-­ colonial organization that drew more attention to the inequities of the colonial order with every new, highly publicized confrontation with the state. The political movement that coalesced largely around Musazi’s illegal cooperative union performed as a vessel for anti-­colonial politics for a time and a conduit for a range of strategies and techniques of rural resistance. It brought the problem of colonial power that operated inside the cooperative movement in Africa into open discussion in spaces of protest in Uganda and in the colonial metropole, including in Parliament. By using a combination of boycott and local and international publicity techniques, the UAFU/Federation was able to exert substantial pressure against the levers of power in the Protectorate government. Many of the farmer groups eventually enrolled under the state system that they had resisted, but before doing so they used their activism to decolonize important parts of the cooperative law. They had stripped away the power of the Registrar and forced the government to concede that an overtly political organization working to agitate for independence could still claim a place in the cooperative movement. The independent farmers’ movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s (including the organizations led by Mulumba and Kabanda, Danieri Kizito, and

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others in addition to the UAFU/Federation) also brought down many of the racially defined barriers in the cotton and coffee marketing rules. They secured the legal right for Africans to gin their own cotton and to grow all grades of coffee. The Federation would not last long. It went bankrupt in 1955. But by then much of the Federation’s political energy had transferred to Musazi’s formidable new project: the Uganda National Congress (UNC or Congress). Musazi launched Congress, Uganda’s first political party, in 1952 along with Abu Mayanja, a Federation activist. Congress’s organizational structure connecting its local and national levels was built directly on top of the existing structure of the Federation.129 The Federation’s “structure of participation” in “branch meetings, resolutions, delegates, [and] conferences” also was replicated in Congress.130 Congress would be a force in Ugandan politics for the rest of the 1950s, and political alliances and fractures within Congress helped to define the trajectory of anti-­colonial politics through independence. During the Kabaka Crisis of 1953–55, when Cohen exiled Muteesa II for having joined popular calls for Buganda’s independence from the Protectorate, Congress was influential in successfully pressuring the British government for his return. Congress built on earlier efforts by Musazi, Mulumba, and others to connect the anti-­colonial cause in Uganda to Pan-­African politics even as a dispute over tactics forced Musazi out of the party he had helped to start. The major division took place in the wake of the All-­African People’s Conference in Accra in 1958, which Mayanja and several other UNC members attended. Now a large faction in Congress, including Mayanja, opposed Musazi and embraced the Accra Conference resolutions, which included a demand for an immediate end to European imperialism in Africa and a commitment of solidarity with both violent and nonviolent movements to topple colonial regimes and condemned “ ‘those African traditional institutions whether political, social, or economic which have clearly shown their reactionary character and their sordid support for colonialism.’ ” Soon after, Congress opened an office in Cairo.131 The Egyptian Revolution had taken place in 1952, and through the 1960s not just Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser but a range of labor federations, teachers’ organizations, student groups, and others—including radio stations—offered help and sought to make Cairo a haven for African students and activists involved in liberation movements.132 The UNC began broadcasting radio programming in Swahili and Luganda, now pursuing a strategy to directly contest Buganda’s institutions, especially the Lukiko. Musazi opposed the opening of the Cairo office, claiming it was backed by the Soviet Union (which may have been true to some degree). Musazi first tried to expel the leaders of the faction that supported the Cairo office, but he was on the losing side of the contest and was himself expelled from Congress in 1959, after which point his influence in Ugandan politics faded.133 Because of the way it touched important areas of rural life in the colonial economy, “Cooperative Rule” became part of the contested ground of anti-­colonial

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struggle in the final decades of British colonial rule almost everywhere. In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah’s socialist Convention People’s Party (CPP) opposed the cooperative movement of British planning and saw it as a major obstacle. During the years of anti-­colonial struggle the CPP worked to organize among cocoa farmers and faced significant opposition among members of registered cooperatives. After independence, the CPP enacted its plan for socialist development, which involved an important component of nationalization of the cocoa sector via the granting of a monopoly on cocoa purchasing to a government-­owned entity, the United Ghana Farmers Council. There was resistance to the plan from within the Cooperative Department, where officials cited the importance of the Rochdale principles. In 1961, Nkrumah responded to that opposition by abolishing the Cooperative Department altogether and confiscating the assets of cocoa cooperatives.134 Elsewhere in Africa cooperatives were part of postcolonial development plans, and in some places there still were cooperative departments after independence. However, we would miss an important part of the story of decolonization if we took that fact and looked for the postcolonial influence of the cooperative system or community development in general as construed by British authorities. Nor should we see it as the “spread” of the cooperative movement as such (with its genealogies in British and European self-­help movements). To be sure, British colonialism had helped to make cooperatives part of the common language of development discourse by the mid-­twentieth century. But that did not mean that the British monopolized its meanings or that they were able to define its forms and practice. And indeed, the most striking aspect of cooperatives in anti-­colonial movements and in their postcolonial usage is how they were imagined as a means to disrupt and dismantle colonial power and how differently they were conceptualized as part of African socialism. Where cooperatives and cooperative departments remained in the new architecture of postcolonial socialist states, there were decisive breaks with what the British had done with them. In late 1960s Uganda, Milton Obote’s socialist government permitted registered cooperatives to operate under tight controls, but the major focus of economic and agricultural policy was on nationalization of industries.135 African socialism in Zambia reframed cooperative development in projects that focused on state-­directed cooperative farming.136 The most well-­known example of African socialism—Julius Nyerere’s ujamaa plan in Tanzania—pinned rural development to the creation of a system of new villages and state farms.137 Ujamaa worked with the terms “Cooperative” and “Community Development” at places in its administration, but ujamaa’s community development concepts were very different from those envisaged by colonial planners, and enacting them required a very different kind of participation from postcolonial Tanzanians. Nyerere presented ujamaa not as a means for Tanzanians to complete the program of economic development charted by British colonizers but rather as a means of undoing the history of colonial projects.138 As

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Monique Bedasse writes, ujamaa was deliberately meant “to appeal to the memory of how Tanzanian societies functioned before the arrival of Europeans,” and that vision of African socialism was a large part of what made Tanzania such a potent symbol of liberation for the African diaspora and “the mecca of pan-­Africanism after 1966.”139 And where ujamaa drew from development models and international development discourse, it was in solidarity with the post-­Bandung Non-­ Aligned Movement. Priya Lal emphasizes for ujamaa (and for African socialism in general) its “multiple imaginative genealogies.” Rather than adopting the prepackaged development models of European late colonial states, Tanzanian leaders drew from and contributed to an “alternative ideological field” in which development concepts germinated from Third World networks of development thought and practice across multiple postcolonial sites from the 1940s through the 1960s.140 In the end, that is where we must place ideas about cooperatives and community development at the end of empire in African postcolonial states: not as a derivative discourse of British, European, or American community d ­ evelopers, but as part of the vital language of anti-­imperial revolution.

5

Cooperatives and Decolonization in Postwar Britain

So far this book has looked at the cooperative movement as it was envisioned as part of a strategy of imperial rescue and how that vision took hold in administrative cultures in the colonies and became central to British community development. It has focused on the peripheries of empire: how development ideas that clustered around cooperatives moved between colonial sites and how plans were contested by political movements that sought to wrest control of cooperatives away from colonial rulers and subvert and reimagine them for anti-­colonial ends. This chapter turns its focus to the political spaces and culture of the cooperative movement in Britain to explore how British cooperators were addressed by the spectacle of colonial community development, how through it they interpreted their special connection to empire and decolonization, and how the British consumer cooperative movement interacted with anti-­colonial politics (especially the Anti-­Apartheid Movement [AAM]). Cooperators used “cooperation in the colonies” to construct new myths about the movement in Britain and about Britain’s end-­of-­empire history: namely, that the cooperative movement in its culture and institutions was foundationally anti-­racist and committed to racial equality “at home” and in the decolonizing world. In doing so, they filtered the colonial social science about culture change and the experts’ arguments about community development into an everyday story about the need for a British-­guided cooperative movement to reconstruct societies in Asia and Africa and train them in democracy. In the 1950s and the 1960s, British politicians often insisted that decolonization was a planned process. Britain, the argument went, was helping democratic movements move forward toward self-­determination as leaders of new nations. Anti-­ colonial thinkers and new national leaders rejected that discourse. They were 142

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thinking internationally and working collaboratively to connect anti-­colonial movements, cognizant that decolonization in that sense of managed process masked active and concerted work by European empires to stand together against the toppling of the old order of domination.1 In reality, far from being a planned process, the events of decolonization and the victories of anti-­colonial movements caught the British off guard. After the loss of India in 1947, Britain tried desperately to hang onto what was left of the empire, especially in Africa. It quickly became clear that the British were losing control as the successes of anti-­colonial revolutions quickly mounted. The Egyptian Revolution took place in 1952 (and then came the embarrassment of the 1957 Suez Crisis, when Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the canal zone and the British, along with Israel and France, failed spectacularly in their attempt to take it back by military force). Ghana became independent in 1957, making Accra the new center of Pan-­African, anti-­colonial internationalism for a time before the revolutionary momentum shifted to Dar es Salaam with Tanzania’s independence in 1961, energized by Julius Nyerere’s new vision of ujamma. In 1963 Britain’s late-­empire construction of the Central African Federation—its “last great empire-­building initiative”—crumbled under the force of African revolt and the reactionary determination of Southern Rhodesia’s settlers to uphold white supremacy.2 When the Federation fell apart, Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia) and Malawi (Nyasaland) both became new nations under African leadership. Southern Rhodesia changed its name to Rhodesia (still honoring the British magnate and symbol of British empire building and white supremacy in southern Africa, Cecil Rhodes). Rhodesia’s whites, unwilling to contemplate equal political rights for the majority Black population, issued their Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, left the Commonwealth, and fought a long war against African liberation forces that dragged on through the 1970s and finally ended with the creation of the new nation of Zimbabwe in 1980. Britain’s end-­of-­empire history was defined—like much of the prior history of British colonial rule—by political repression and state violence, emergency rule, and brutal counterinsurgency. Often this took place under a fog of official secrecy, disinformation, and carefully crafted apologetics designed to shield Britain from criticism by anti-­colonial and human rights activists.3 Some episodes were almost entirely out of view. Only a tiny sliver of the British public had any knowledge at all about the 1949–1951 emergency in Uganda, much less about the political repression, collective punishment, and colonial state violence that defined emergency rule there for those who lived through it (there would be further declarations of emergency in Uganda before the anti-­colonial revolt was able to push the British out in 1962). Not everything could be hidden, and abuses and atrocities perpetrated by colonial authorities and the British military posed a challenge in the postwar age of human rights. Officials and legal advisers in the Colonial Office scrambled to prevent new frameworks of human rights enforcement—such as

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the European Convention on Human Rights—from applying to British abuses in colonial territories.4 The abuses piled up. In 1953, Britain overthrew the elected government of popular Left leader Cheddi Jagan in British Guiana and imposed emergency rule for three years. In Malaya, the British military battled the communist Malayan National Liberation Army through the entire decade of the 1950s. The British military’s plan to defeat the insurgency involved the forced resettlement of hundreds of thousands of rural Chinese from their homes and into “New Villages,” where the British crafted a program of reeducation and social reconstruction that combined food control and psychological warfare techniques with (aided by Christian missionaries) community development, welfare, and moral reform.5 In Kenya, settlers and the colonial state along with the British military waged a brutal war against the Mau Mau rebellion that dragged on for most of the 1950s, involving atrocities perpetrated by the British and by Mau Mau ­fighters. The British constructed camps where hundreds of thousands of suspected Mau Mau fighters and suspected supporters were detained and where some were tortured and killed. Barbed wire was erected around entire villages believed to be supportive of the Mau Mau cause, and guard towers were put up, turning them into concentration camps.6 In Britain, the wars in Malaya and Kenya received a lot of media attention, ensuring that Britons perceived violence as part of Britain’s end-­of-­empire history. But the media narrative was lopsided, framing the wars as the harrowing struggles of besieged white settlers while exculpating Britain for the violence.7 Britain’s end-­of-­empire history was not just a matter of what took place in territories under its direct control but also must include what was done in places where Britain was indispensable in maintaining racist colonial regimes. In South Africa the British government had been deeply complicit in helping to consolidate apartheid rule and to shore it up against anti-­colonial resistance. Not only was Britain South Africa’s largest trade partner and its greatest source of foreign investment, but regardless of whether Labour or Conservatives were in power in Britain, the official policy was to support South Africa as an economic partner and a strategic ally in the fight against communism in Africa.8 The South African Communist Party was an important group in the anti-­apartheid struggle, and it became increasingly so as Britain, the United States, and other states that espoused commitments to racial equality in principle failed to act against apartheid rule. Especially from the late 1960s onward, the South African Communist Party was an important conduit for Soviet support, which was crucial for the cause long term in arming the resistance.9 The apartheid government constantly depicted the anti-­apartheid movement as a whole in terms of a communist conspiracy, which was never the case. In 1950, the government passed the Suppression of Communism Act, which was applied so broadly that it effectively criminalized all forms of anti-­apartheid solidarity. British politicians and diplomats often spoke out against

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apartheid and the actions of the National Party, and yet when South Africa came under criticism at the United Nations, it was the British delegation that rallied as its stalwart defender.10 The stakes involved in the anti-­apartheid struggle could not have been higher for African nationalists, not just in South Africa but across the continent. How to effectively organize anti-­colonial internationalist solidarity against apartheid was a major point of discussion at the Bandung Conference. At the United Nations, delegates from new African states worked a long diplomatic strategy in the General Assembly to isolate South Africa.11 New post­ colonial states that remained in the Commonwealth used their membership to agitate against South Africa being allowed to remain a Commonwealth state while continuing apartheid, and in 1961 South Africa withdrew its application to renew its Common­wealth membership and then left the Commonwealth. It would take decades before apartheid would fall, and one major obstacle was convincing British politicians and the citizens who elected them to meaningfully commit to joining the economic sanctions and boycott campaign (a problem of apathy that implicated the British cooperative movement). Decolonization was not experienced solely on the colonial periphery and in places where Britain was fighting wars to maintain its imperial grip or helping to prop up apartheid. Rather, decolonization was transformative in British society. In manifold ways decolonization and efforts to define its meanings reverberated through culture and politics. One of the most profound effects was how end-­of-­ empire events shaped the politics of racial whiteness and anti-­Blackness in Britain. As independence movements won victories against European colonial regimes, virulent articulations of racial whiteness intensified in Britain and targeted Commonwealth migrants with discrimination in housing and employment and with physical violence—such as the anti-­Black violence that erupted in Notting Hill and Nottingham in 1958. Bill Schwarz writes that in the colonies and in the metropole alike, decolonization incubated a “presentiment of disorder” that “was above all about race, driven by the fear that white ascendancy was about to be turned upside down.”12 The settler cause, especially in Rhodesia, became a vehicle for the formation of a new populist right in Britain. As Rhodesia’s settlers held high the banner of white supremacy in calls for the defense of a British civilization on the verge of being overrun by Africans, in Britain pressure groups like the Monday Club operated within the Conservative Party to bridge the parliamentary party to neighborhood groups of “concerned ‘citizens’ or ‘ratepayers’ ” in a politics that dramatized Commonwealth migration as invasion and the “home-­nation . . . [as] on the point of destruction.”13 A reactionary movement gained traction against the 1948 British Nationalities Act, which had codified the right of Commonwealth citizens to travel freely to and live and work in Britain. Black Britons exercised that right, made claims of belonging in Britain and to membership in an imperial community of British citizens, and organized and campaigned to defend their rights.14

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In 1962 the Commonwealth Immigrants Act was passed, placing strict control on Commonwealth migration. The racism migrants faced was not just a feature of the Far Right but rather was woven into the fabric of British institutions, law, culture, and society. If the Far Right saw Commonwealth migrants as invaders, then there was also a more liberal, respectable discourse that identified them as a sociological problem—as a new and disruptive “flood” that was throwing British society into upheaval and needed to be managed. Here colonial social science of an earlier era came rebounding back to Britain to shape how the state and its experts on community identified and treated Commonwealth newcomers. Emergent fields of study such as “race relations” and “community studies” now trained the methodologies of social anthropology—honed during the interwar period by British community experts in the empire, especially in Africa—on the new problematic of rapidly transforming social organization in Britain and focused intense scrutiny on the newly constructed category of “the migrant.”15 It was, however, the anti-­Black violence in Nottingham and London in 1958— covered as “race riots”—that shocked audiences around the world. Kennetta Hammond Perry has shown how a great cultural and political effort took place in the wake of the violence to explain it in ways that would preserve an idea of Britain as welcoming and not hostile to Commonwealth newcomers. Accounts in the media and by British officials and leaders in the labor movement, along with decisions in courts, pointed to causes in the social stresses of the moment—in the form of unemployment and overcrowding in housing that were said to be inflaming race relations—and otherwise sought to cordon off the more immediate blame for the violence by ascribing it to the socially deviant “hooliganism” of AfricanCaribbean young men and white “Teddy boys.” British society at large and British institutions were exempted from blame. Collectively, the discourses worked “to mark an imagined boundary of Britishness that encompassed an orderly society with laws intolerant of racial violence.”16 What was at stake in the rush to define the meanings and delimit the scale of racism to a socially deviant few was the preservation of what Perry calls “the mystique of British anti-­racism,” which describes “the collective myths” that historically have “sustained and reinforced anti-­racist perceptions of British liberalism, tolerance, and ostensible benevolence toward racialized colonial subjects.” In the postwar era, the mystique of British anti-­racism “functioned as a potent element of representations of Britain and Britishness both at home and abroad.”17 Perry’s concept provides a compelling analytic frame for thinking about the British cooperative movement in the postwar moment, shaped as it was by late colonialism and decolonization. Later I argue that the British cooperative movement took part in the mythmaking, supplying its own narratives that cast the movement as an ally to Commonwealth newcomers and to the “new free countries.” It helped to guard from view—and thereby perpetuate by helping to delay a reckoning with—the institutionalized racism at the heart of postwar British

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culture and society. And in this, the cooperative movement’s entanglement with colonial development played an important role. There were very genuine and inspiring efforts by many cooperators to try to shape the movement into a powerful force for colonial liberation and anti-­racism, and I offer an account of some of that activist work later (especially in the activities of cooperators who participated in the Movement for Colonial Freedom [MCF] and the AAM). However, on the whole the political center of the cooperative movement was a space of comfortable complacency, and part of that was a result of the gradualist theory of cooperativism that had been present from the beginning. It allowed the cooperative movement to see itself as a force for world transformation toward democracy, human rights, racial equality, and colonial liberation by just practicing and promoting its Rochdale principles. What is more, the work of British colonial states to use cooperatives allowed cooperators to become more patriotic about their empire, not less so. While often disavowing the end-­of-­empire violence of British colonial states and the British military, leaders in the British cooperative movement endorsed the overarching rationale of continued British rule: that there was a historical scale of time for development, and that for most people in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia, its end had not yet been reached. The cooperative movement held the answer, but its slow and gradual tools of individual moral conversion, material uplift, and community-­ centered training in what cooperative leaders called “true democracy”—as opposed to the insubstantial and premature “political democracy” that anti-­colonial movements were demanding— needed a much longer time to grow. As Cooperative Party MP James Hudson put it, using the metaphor of slowly growing light that was popular in the movement as a way to capture cooperativism’s gradual but world changing potential: the cooperative movement in the colonies was a light in the political darkness defined for the age by “the murderous assaults of Mau Mau” and by “the brutal efforts of imperial authority to protect itself.” The light was growing “in ever-­increasing circles” and would one day achieve “a true partnership and co-­operation of the coloured ­peoples and their white brothers.” He then explained that the Colonial Office and the cooperative movement were carrying forward that light together.18 Looking at the cooperative movement as it looked outward on late colonial development—and inward on itself through the lens of its activities with development—­allows us to assess decolonization as it shaped the cooperative movement “at home.” In its spaces of cooperative democracy, the co-­op cultivated a postwar self-­image as a movement whose consumerism was dedicated to advancing democratic socialism in Britain and standing with Commonwealth migrants against racism. But the self-­image did not hold up to the reality of a consumer movement that, in spite of many pronouncements of solidarity, often looked first to business considerations. The cooperative movement included many members who were themselves Commonwealth migrants. However, the movement also included many members deeply invested in white supremacy, who wanted those migrants to

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stay away from their neighborhoods. When the political energies of anti-­colonial, anti-­racist activists clashed with the business-­mindedness of the co-­op’s liberal-­ progressive leaders, all too often the business arguments won out. It was easy to endorse a resolution. It was much harder to turn it into solidarity, which involves action. The Cooperative Party responded to the anti-­Black violence at Notting Hill and Nottingham by unanimously adopting a resolution denouncing “race hatred.” In introducing that resolution, Mr. S. Carn from the all-­important London branch of the Cooperative Party extolled the cooperative movement for its nondiscriminatory hiring practices, claiming that “those who have moved from other parts of the Commonwealth to Britain will find in our Movement a comradeship second to none.”19 And yet a year later anti-­racism and anti-­colonial activists, including many cooperators, were shocked and appalled to learn that Britain’s largest cooperative society (of which Carn himself was a member)—the London Cooperative Society (LCS)—­operated an employment “colour bar” in an important area of its business: its roundsmen delivery service, which brought co-­op baked goods to customers’ doorsteps. What follows in this chapter is, first, a discussion of how cooperators in Britain learned to recognize themselves in the Colonial Office’s postwar community development strategy. To assess that I plot cooperative culture and imperial identity on a longer time scale, tracking back over the time period covered in this book. It was only after World War II that cooperators really took notice of their connection to community development. I explore some of the meanings cooperators found in that colonial development connection. British cooperators tended to see the cooperative movement in the colonies as official British propaganda presented it: a movement toward democracy in which the colonial state was helping. In this flattened frame there was no room for anti-­colonial politics or for alternative visions of community development or cooperative economics that could be used to do anything other than to move African-Caribbeans, Africans, and Asians in a direction already mapped by European experience, the path already followed by the British cooperative movement. In the last section I look at efforts of anti-­ colonial activists to organize within the cooperative movement, especially within the London Cooperative Society and its nationally important Political Committee. I conclude with a discussion of the failures of the cooperative to measure up to its postwar self-­image through an assessment of the cooperative movement and the anti-­apartheid boycott campaign and the uncomfortable fact of the LCS’s “colour bar” in the heart of progressive London. “C O L O N IA L C O O P E R AT IO N ” F R OM T H E L AT E I M P E R IA L M E T R O P O L E

The cooperative movement grew up in imperial Britain and took part in larger transformations of British attitudes toward empire and discourses of imperial

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community. As a result, the internationalism of the movement embodied in its grand ideal of a worldwide “Cooperative Commonwealth” was “riven with contradictions.” Cooperators attached Englishness and Britishness to their movement in ways that easily merged with pro-­imperial sentiments and saw the movement as part of a British civilizing mission.20 In the early twentieth century the cooperative movement was a new horizon of imperial community that should be seen as an extension of the concept of “Greater Britain” that had structured much of the political discussion of empire in the late Victorian era.21 Leaders in the movement talked about cooperatives as a means of strengthening imperial bonds. Like the submarine telegraph, empire radio, and imperial penny post, “the cooperative movement in the colonies” evoked connectivity between “home” in Britain and newly constituted British settler enclaves in the empire. The Co-­op Party’s pro-­free-­trade “empire policy,” endorsed by the party’s national committee in 1927, was couched in terms of a mandate to build and strengthen the empire: “Co-­operation has already accomplished much in connection with Empire development. Our great Wholesale Societies have been the medium of helping considerably the producers of the Empire, whilst materially safeguarding the interests of the consumer at home. The bonds of Empire will not be strengthened by reviving tariff barriers but only by the application of Co-­operative principles in our relationship with the Dominion and Crown Colonies.”22 But British cooperators were not then thinking of development in the sense of community development we have been tracking in this book. The Co-­op Party’s reference to “Empire development” in its interwar empire policy, in other words, was not to endorse organized planning to bring Indigenous African or Asian communities on board the cooperative movement. It was, instead, a proclamation that the British cooperative movement was a major player in the new imperialism and could go toe to toe with the large capitalist corporations that owned estates and held trading concessions in colonial territories. That was the point conveyed as well to delegates to the 1918 Cooperative Congress in Liverpool when they were reminded that “the business operations of the movement as a whole are spread all over the Empire, and it must never be forgotten that it is the aggregation of the multitudinous small purchases of millions of more or less scattered co-­operative units that the Wholesale Societies stand as giants in the marts of commerce, not only in Great Britain but in the colonies and in foreign countries beyond the seas.”23 There was also the view of Cooperative Wholesale Society (CWS) board member and future Cooperative Congress president William Lander, who might have been mistaken for any imperialist of the day when he argued in 1906 that the cooperative movement needed to “take their share in ‘controlling the raw materials, the markets of the world.’ ”24 Lander believed that the CWS’s mere presence in colonial territories as an employer and a buyer somehow would result in a progressive improvement for people currently in a “backward state of civilization.”25 A business history of the CWS aptly calls the period from 1890 to 1914 the wholesaler’s “Age of Expansion,” as it sought to compete with large capitalist firms

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by vertically integrating its supply chains. It started operating its own plantations and factories in territories controlled by the British and other imperial powers.26 As it expanded into these territories, the CWS produced publicity that projected its imperial and global reach and wrapped the cooperative movement in the British civilizing mission. In order to compete with the Lever Brothers in the palm oil soap business, the CWS started its own oil-­producing factory in Sierra Leone after securing a concession to purchase copra from Africans throughout a three-­ hundred-­square mile area of the colony. Cooperative members in Britain read about their expansion in Africa in the pages of Co-­operative News along with reassurances that the wholesaler did not intend “ ‘to exploit the poor natives.’ ”27 By 1913 the CWS was operating its own tea plantations and processing factories in India and Ceylon on more than thirty thousand acres (by the early 1930s the CWS’s combined English and Scottish wholesale operation made it the largest tea distributor in Britain). Like other larger and small retailers, the CWS had its own “empire” brand.28 Its publicity featuring its plantations in the early decades of the twen­ tieth century vouched for the cooperative’s benign and even civilizing purpose; the CWS was not exploiting its plantation workers but lifting them up. The film Rose of the Orient (1931) is a good example. It told two stories. One was a historical narrative of British tea and the British empire that connected the modern CWS to imperial roots in the eighteenth-­century East India Company. The other was a modern story of tea that traced its present route from CWS plantations in Ceylon to the cooperative consumer in Britain. It focused on an orderly and efficient work process, moving through shots of the sounding of the morning muster to work on the plantation, tea picking, and the work of drying and grading at the factory. British managers supervised and intervened along the way, organizing work parties and tasting the product for quality before it was packaged for its long journey to Colombo by rail and then by ship to London, eventually arriving in a shopper’s basket at a co-­op store. The final scene connected the story of colonial work and the movement of the imperial commodity to the ideas of community, family, and Britishness through a sequence of shots of people all over Britain sipping CWS tea.29 Rose of the Orient emphasized the good working conditions on the CWS plantations and the cooperative’s contented workers, including shots of Tamil ­workers singing and dancing during their leisure time.30 In reality the CWS was fully capable of acting like a capitalist business in finding savings (and higher dividends to members) by exploiting workers and paying low wages. That was true of consumer cooperatives as employers in Britain.31 The exploitation was more severe and more hidden on the colonial plantations, which the CWS continued to own and operate after independence in India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka after 1972). Inside the British cooperative movement criticism of the rumored poor conditions for workers on CWS tea estates for decades was confined to a very small number of concerned members.32 When some tried to raise the issue through the London Cooperative

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Society Political Committee in the early 1950s, cooperative leaders dismissed their concerns. In the words of one director of the CWS, James Peddie, there was “nothing at all to be ashamed of, and much to be proud of in our conduct of the tea plantations.” Like the neoliberal arguments for low wages that would become routine under post–Cold War globalization, Peddie insisted that the CWS’s treatment of its workers needed to be judged on a sliding global standard. Plantation wages were only “shocking, or appalling” if compared to the wages of workers in Britain, whereas workers on the CWS plantations “over long years have operated in a vastly different way from the workers in this country,” and so it was right to pay them lower wages.33 It was not until the 1970s that the dismal wages and unhealthy working conditions on the tea plantations came into view widely for cooperators in Britain, and then it was thanks to an exposé by a television program that investigated conditions on plantations in Sri Lanka operated by the major household brands. The investigative report found that conditions for workers on the CWS estates were as bad as and in some aspects worse than on the capitalists’ estates.34 But all that stayed out of view for most cooperators for most of the twentieth century, and that was especially true before the Second World War. What dominated their vision outward from Britain was the manufactured image of the cooperative as a fair and humane employer and a civilizing agent and colonial resource developer (paradoxically in harmony with both the ideal of the British empire and the spirit of internationalism). Some invested hope and pride in the work of the International Cooperative Alliance in spreading the cooperative movement abroad. However, throughout the interwar decades the idea of reconstructing Indigenous societies through community development with the cooperative movement as the grassroots engine of social transformation was confined mostly to the colonial periphery. That changed in the postwar era. Where cooperators had imagined cooperative links to tighten the bonds of empire, now they also saw beneficent, didactic links to modernizing racialized colonial subjects of the empire. The shift was part of a wider turn in popular attitudes toward empire as development discourse took over, deployed through rhetorics that cast the British as teachers and guides in economic development and multiracial democracy within the Commonwealth. The spectacle of British-­led grassroots modernization that had been crafted originally by missionaries and government agents and experts working in fields of colonial rural reconstruction and community development now addressed audiences in Britain. Cooperatives became the ubiquitous symbol of community development, which struck a special chord inside the cooperative movement. As one LCS member, Mr. W. Stephens, put it: the “lack of co-­operation” was one of the root causes of “suffering and a low standard of living” in British colonies. By helping to grow the cooperative movement in the colonies, British cooperators could seize “a splendid opportunity . . . to show these people that we are sympathetic to the problems which are overcoming them.”35

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Film registered the postwar cultural shift. Perhaps nowhere is this better seen than in the 1949 Oscar-­winning film Daybreak in Udi, which dramatized the British empire’s turn to community development and depicted the cooperative movement as in the vanguard of that turn in Africa. The film made an impact inside the cooperative movement and gave leaders an example to promote to members of how the cooperative movement and Labour’s Colonial Office were working hand in hand to develop Africa. It was a government propaganda film made by the Ministry of Information through its Crown Film Unit, so we can read it as the Labour government’s own argument about development with the cooperative movement at its heart. We have seen how community development was enacted as spectacle in demonstration plots, film, and other instructional media in British colonies. Daybreak in Udi shows how that spectacle was used to address audiences in the metropole, inviting Britons to see themselves in it and suggesting how Britons should view this new purpose for empire.36 Directed by Terry Bishop, Daybreak in Udi was filmed on location in the Igbo area of southeastern Nigeria.37 It tried to capture, as the opening titles proclaimed, how “an Ancient African tribe, the Abaja Ibos, have undertaken an ambitious programme of Community Development which has seldom been equaled” and that was “starting to bridge the centuries dividing their way of life and ours.” The film distilled postwar British community development into story lines and shot sequences that emphasized the grassroots initiative supposed to be the engine driving development under British guidance. The script was based on recent events documented by Edward Chadwick, a career colonial administrator who was an influential promoter of community development in Eastern Nigeria and British Came­roon. Chadwick was well versed in the principles and practice of incorporating cooperatives as part of British colonial development, and in fact during his early career in Nigeria he had interacted with Strickland during the latter’s study tour of West Africa in the early 1930s.38 The film’s story was presented as Chadwick’s personal recollections of a very recent and ongoing moment in the territory, “when the idea of self-­help is spreading like a bush fire.” The plot revolved around a village campaign to build a maternity hospital and to hire a trained midwife as a response to the death of a newborn baby in the village. Chadwick himself played the key part in the film of the advice-­giving district officer who guides the villagers through practical steps to realize the project, which starts with forming a cooperative to finance it. Chadwick would make sure that the British matched the local initiative with some of the building materials, but the hospital would be built by the voluntary labor of the men of the village. The central conflict of the film is the political battle that ensues in the village over the question of British-­guided development. The struggle pits a group of modernizing teachers from the village (led by a woman, Iruka, and two men, Dominic and James) who look to the British district officer for advice in dealing with a

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faction (led by an influential man named Eze) that vocally opposes the maternity hospital and the change, instigated by the British, that it represents. The success of the project—and with it, implicitly, British-­guided community development writ large—hinges on the women’s cooperative holding together and its members maintaining their resolve in the face of critics like Eze, who stoke fears that if women go to the hospital, either they will die or their babies will be deformed. Victory comes for the modernizers when a woman from a neighboring village is brought to the new maternity hospital and delivers a healthy baby. In the end, the cooperative maternity hospital is projected as the dawn of self-­help modernization, and in the final scene a small contingent of people from Umana who want to take community development to its next level go to watch and learn from a neighboring village as it tackles a road-­building project that will connect it to a neighboring town. Filmgoers were left with the anticipation that all such progressive African villages would soon be connected to each other and connected outward to the world beyond Africa. There was emotional power in the spectacle of colonial modernization enacted by the film as it dramatized bottom-­up development. What started with a small voluntary group grew into the organizational structure of a cooperative society. In the end the women’s cooperative triumphed over tradition and materially improved conditions for a new type of modern African. So popular was the film among members and leaders of the British cooperative movement that the movement’s key political and cultural organizations were able to capitalize on the film’s success with their own publicity material. In 1954 the Cooperative Party and the Cooperative Union jointly produced a pamphlet on cooperatives in the British empire, Daybreak in the Colonies, that played off the film’s title and became something of a policy statement on how cooperative societies and members ought to think about development and the British movement’s role in it. It urged British cooperators to go to the colonies as advisers and urged cooperative societies in Britain to adopt fledgling societies in the colonies. With photos provided by the Ministry of Information, the publication presented stories of cooperative movement successes in the empire that heralded its promise as an agent of economic and political development. In a foreword, Cooperative Party MP James Hudson drew a parallel to welfare in Britain. The “mothers of Nigeria” showed that cooperatives could do in Africa, “in part at least, what vast schemes of national maternity welfare have accomplished in Britain.”39 Daybreak in Udi presented the very idea of economic cooperation—at least of a productive and useful kind—as something derived from the experience of the West and shared with Africans.40 The British were supposed to be teaching Africans how to live in communities that participated in the modern world of money, wages, commodities, and consumption. The film imagined that progress was guaranteed under British guidance if Africans would only embrace their own role as students of development and overcome tradition and the jealous power

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of old elites. All modernization required was the pooled savings of communities paired with the expertise of British developers—development on an austerity budget. However, in the film and in the cooperative movement pamphlet inspired by it, it was unclear quite how cooperatives in Nigeria were supposed to achieve what Britain’s postwar Labour government had only done with difficulty, namely building a vast maternity welfare scheme. Even as the film won its Oscar, the women’s maternity cooperatives of Nigeria struggled to survive. In 1950 there were only four registered, and two were temporarily shut down the year the film was made owing to rising costs of drugs and midwives’ salaries. One of these was in the very village of Umana and had “originated coincidentally with the making of” the film. The Registrar of Cooperative Societies dryly noted in his annual report that year that the Umana Umuwawo society “had less success than the picture.”41 The British cooperative movement believed in “Cooperative Rule.” The orthodoxies of the Punjab Registrars had worked their way into how cooperative leaders talked about “cooperation in the colonies.” Most British cooperators who took an interest in cooperative development took for granted that there were special conditions in colonial territories that necessitated in the short term a deeper connection between the movement and the guiding-­hand colonial state. British cooperators were at ease with this partly because the story of the colonial state/cooperative movement nexus was anchored in the belief—to a certain extent correct—­that the turn to cooperative development was the outcome of their own (Cooperative Party and) Labour Party victory in 1945. True, state-­guided cooperative development continued when Conservatives returned to power in 1951, and Conservatives in the Colonial Office claimed to see its importance.42 Even so, the work of the Labour government to draft model cooperative laws and to press colonial governments to advance cooperative development was written into the way cooperative leaders told the story of how the cooperative light was spreading in the empire. The pronounced role of the colonial state was also, in theory, only temporary. The informed view in the British movement was that after a government kick start, and then after waves of British cooperative movement missionaries going as guides to help colonial cooperators practice the Rochdale principles, eventually the movement in the colonies would mature, and national cooperative unions could take over the functions for the temporarily necessary but not-­so-­democratic Registrar and his rural administrative bureaucracy. The pathway whereby the cooperative movement would take-­over “step by step from the Registrar” was described for members in Daybreak in the Colonies. But it was clear that for now the Registrar was necessary.43 Labour’s Colonial Office enlisted the British cooperative movement to support its development plan. Meaningful links were forged between the movement and the Colonial Office. An important one was the colonial training program at Cooperative College at Stanford Hall near Loughborough in Leicestershire. It can

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be placed alongside better-­known examples of postwar efforts by British educational institutions—for instance Oxford and Cambridge—to develop programs geared toward training future civil servants recruited from colonies. Officials in the Colonial Office envisaged such training courses as the “ ‘most potent means’ of ensuring the ‘continuance of the British tradition and British ideals in administration in the Colonies.’”44 Cooperative College was a long-­standing institution of the British cooperative movement, founded in 1914 by the Cooperative Union to teach the principles and practice of cooperation to the movement’s leaders in the making. Beginning in 1946, the college collaborated with the Colonial Office on its colonial cooperative training program.45 The program was intended primarily to train Assistant Registrars, inspectors, and other officers sent from colonial Cooperative Departments. Students were in residence at the college for three terms of specialist classes and a series of study tours with cooperative societies in Britain and in Europe. In the first four years of the program, students came from a number of British territories, including Jamaica, Trinidad, Nyasaland, and Uganda. The most reliable sponsoring governments were Nigeria, Gold Coast, Cyprus, and Tanganyika.46 Individual societies and cooperative unions also sent employees for training. For instance, most of the students who came from Tanganyika were sponsored by either the Kilimanjaro Native Cooperative Union (KNCU) or the Bukoba Cooperative Union rather than by the government.47 The college worked in close collaboration with the Colonial Office to incorporate the accumulated expertise of the colonial cooperative planners into how it taught the movement and colonial people’s place within it. B. J. Surridge, the Colonial Office adviser on cooperation, oversaw the development of the curriculum from the government angle and sometimes gave lectures at Stanford Hall. One of the core textbooks for the program was A Manual of Co-­operative Law and Practice, which he had coauthored with Margaret Digby of the International Cooperative Alliance. The curriculum emphasized the special character of colonial cooperation that necessitated a strong supervisory role for the colonial state in order for the best elements of the British (and European) movement to take root. The required course, Survey of Cooperative Organization, explored the founding principles of British cooperation and told the history of the global movement from Britain outward, focusing especially on the “effect of environment on Cooperative organization.” This framing allowed college lecturers to fold the experts’ orthodoxy about the particularities of colonial conditions into a much larger history of the movement’s capacity to adapt.48 In the early 1950s students from overseas made up about one-­fifth of the student body at Stanford Hall. For the visiting students enrolled in the Co-­operation in the Colonies program, much of their classroom time was spent in lectures and seminars that were exclusively taken by students from colonies. However, the visiting students were able to take any of the other courses offered at the college, and

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they took part in all the college activities.49 The study tours were an important element of the program as well, intended to give the visiting students direct experience of exemplary cooperative societies in Britain and Europe. Students in the program would spend a week of their Christmas holiday working with the Welsh Agricultural Organization Society; a week during spring term with the Scottish Agricultural Organization; sometimes a week at the Horace Plunkett Foundation, which was dedicated to the promotion of rural cooperation; and at the end of the course two weeks visiting agricultural cooperatives in France. The London Cooperative Society also got involved. Students in the program spent one week in London training with LCS staff—a fact that the LCS was quick to point out when defending itself against the charge that it operated a “colour bar.” The interactions between the students from the colonies and British cooperators, at least in the case of London, was confined mostly to the study elements of the training program. There were not usually scheduled talks or social events specifically for London cooperators to interact with the visitors. This was disappointing to some members, who wanted more from these visits and thought of cooperative education not as a one-­directional didactic encounter but as a two-­way exchange that could benefit cooperators in Britain. One highly critical member from Hampstead, Andrew Campbell, lambasted the LCS Political Committee at the London Co-­op Party conference in 1959 for having done “nothing whatever to assist co-­ operatives overseas except to make provision to receive the odd visitors or odd students.” He complained that the yearly visits from Stanford Hall students were mostly treated as nonevents in the London movement, when what was needed was “ways and means of using them and hearing their stories.”50 The Hampstead cooperator’s criticism was harsh, but a milder criticism along the lines of “we ought to be doing more” was the typical vehicle for moving discussions of colonial cooperation inside the political spaces of the movement. Political committees and Cooperative Party conferences passed resolutions encouraging the British movement to do more. Publicity was generated to promote the idea that closer links needed to be forged between the mature British movement and the fledgling movement in the colonies, to be worked out at the society-­to-­society level. Daybreak in the Colonies became an influential policy statement that individual societies acted upon, even though its circulation was fairly limited.51 One thing it did was to draw attention to the cooperative training nexus between government and the movement and between metropole and colony, touting the work of Cooperative College as well as the East African Co-­operative Training College in Kabete, Kenya, the inheritor of the campus and the cooperatives-­focused community development mission of the Jeanes system. It also touted the success of the KNCU and its ongoing use of the Cooperative College for training its personnel. The eye-­catching part of the nineteen-­page publication was the array of

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nearly a dozen photographs capturing the activities of the colonial cooperative movement, including a close-­up of the face of a Chagga farmer from the KNCU; a photograph showing workers for a cooperative growers society in Sierra Leone loading sacks of cocoa beans onto a truck for a journey that the caption advertises “may end in Great Britain”; and several photographs of management committee meetings (in Gold Coast, Fiji, and Cyprus), conveying that cooperators in the colonies were engaged in the everyday democratic work of cooperative self-­help. Daybreak in the Colonies concluded with a call to action directed at cooperative societies in Britain, urging them to support colonial cooperation by contributing to scholarships at Cooperative College, sending consultants to the colonies, engaging in reciprocal trade with producer societies in the empire, and “ ‘adopting’ ” individual cooperative societies (which meant forming “fraternal links” and collecting money to assist the society). In 1959 the LCS did form just such a fraternal link with the Victoria Federation of Co-­operatives Unions, a cotton growers cooperative in the Lake Province of Tanganyika that, like the Uganda African Farmer’s Union (UAFU), was able to win the right to gin their own cotton.52 Daybreak in the Colonies encapsulated the messages that were taking hold in the British movement: that cooperation was the key to colonial development, material uplift, and social progress in the colonies; that cooperatives were uniquely suited to teach democracy and self-­government; and that cooperatives were naturally resistant to racism. Cooperators in Britain put new spins on the political properties of colonial cooperative development, inflected with both the utopianism and the imperial paternalism that ran deep in the movement’s history. Like most Britons during the late imperial moment, cooperators shared the belief that development was about teaching colonized people to be modern, and this implied a political evolution as much as an economic one. However, the argument for cooperatives as an adjunct to democracy went deeper and tapped into a reservoir of historical claims within the movement that identified the cooperative movement, along with the trade union movement, as the organic genesis of English industrial democracy. As Beatrice and Sidney Webb explained in their 1920 Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain, the cooperative movement and trade union movement were “new forms of Democracy” that had grown in reaction to the social realities of industrial society under capitalism in the nineteenth century. They were now as indispensable to effective modern democracy as the forms of political democracy exercised in the vote and in the activities of Parliament.53 In 1961, Mr. W. Coldrick of the Co-­ op Party’s National Committee (and also an original member of the Advisory Committee on Cooperation in the Colonies in Labour’s postwar Colonial Office) connected to that same historical narrative in making the case that colonial cooperatives were incubators of a genuine and sustainable democracy that could not be achieved by revolutionary anti-­colonial movements. People in the colonies

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wanting democracy needed to realize that it had only come to Britain through a slow evolution within the cooperative and trade union movements: Many of them [our colonial friends] imagine that we have had democracy in this country from the time of William the Conqueror. They fail to realise that we built up democracy in this country in the Co-­operative and Trade Union Movements long before we had parliamentary democracy. I am confident that although it is much more spectacular to join social revolutionary movements to demand the moon, it does not make, even in the colonies, so great a contribution to the prosperity and development of the country as it would if some of the people in those places addressed themselves to the pedestrian task of helping to build the Co-­operative Movement.54

Similarly, Peddie of the CWS and the Co-­op Party National Committee argued (against accusations that it had become too commercial) that the kind of democracy that the cooperative movement was building in the colonies was a vindication of the movement’s fundamental social and democratic purpose. Anti-­colonial movements demanded political democracy, but the cooperative movement, arm in arm with the colonial state, offered something better, “true democracy”: If we want recognition of the fact that there is a social and democratic purpose in co-­ operation, we have only to look at the experiments in co-­operative planning in the Colonies. . . . [Labour’s postwar colonial secretaries] recognised that the only sound basis upon which you can build a true democracy in our Colonies is by providing means for co-­operative participation by the natives. . . . I have seen experiments by coloured people, pathetic but inspired efforts. By a true practice of democracy, we are going to build in the Colonies a far better and saner system of democracy than by placing political democracy on their shoulders. That is not the answer to the maiden’s prayer. Giving power to an educated clique, that is the danger of purely political democracy in such places. In the Colonies—if you want no other illustration—there you will find the complete answer as to whether the Co-­operative Movement has any legitimate place in a future society.55

When ideas came up in the LCS about how to assist the cooperative movement in the colonies, members interpreted their efforts as directly contributing to the advance of democracy in hostile conditions. As Mr. T. J. Green, representing cooperators in East Ham South at the 1954 London Co-­op Party Conference, put it when advocating for “much more close and intimate contact” with a society in a British colony: “We know full well how difficult it is to be democratic and efficient in this country. How much more difficult it must be in these Colonial areas. It must be an amazing problem. . . . We should advance democratic progress in these countries. That would be a very fine thing.”56 Mr. J. Millwood of the LCS political committee, who was influential in formalizing the fraternal link with the cotton growers’ cooperative in Tanganyika, interpreted colonial cooperation through the

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cooperative movement’s utopianism. Whereas the cooperative movement was planted by British colonial government, it had the chance to outpace the original cooperative movement in realizing the ideal of the Cooperative Commonwealth. He told London Co-­op Party delegates that Paul Bomani, general manager of the Victoria Federation and member of the Tanganyika Legislative Council, had “learned democracy and is helping to build democracy up into self-­government.” “In Tanganyika,” said Millwood, “Africans are making Co-­operation a way of life, and they are, perhaps, much more likely to build quickly a co-­operative commonwealth than we in this country with our vast vested interests.”57 There also was more than one way to theorize how cooperation could dissolve racism. Daybreak in the Colonies portrayed the cooperative movement as at its core about bringing people together, which made it foundationally resistant to racism. The movement was poised to advance “a true partnership and cooperation of the coloured peoples and their white brothers.”58 The idea was echoed by R. G. Douglas, delegate from Cooperative College, when advocating for a resolution at the 1957 Co-­op Party national conference to condemn the South African government for its repression of anti-­apartheid activists. The case the student cooperator made shows how anti-­colonial critique could thrive in the cooperative movement alongside a misrecognition of the overarching drift of the cooperative movement’s history in the empire. The context for the resolution was a moment of intense repression against a surging anti-­apartheid movement in South Africa during a campaign of civil disobedience, three years before the boycott movement was launched in Britain. In 1955 the African National Congress (ANC) convened a Congress of People, which promulgated a “Freedom Charter” that announced equal rights for all along with a socialist ideal of nationalization of the country’s mineral wealth, banks, and some industries. The state claimed the document was in essence the manifesto of a communist conspiracy, and authorities reacted by arresting and charging with high treason 156 leading activists who had participated in the Congress of People. The treason trial—which ended in acquittal for all the accused in 1961—drew international attention and helped to popularize the anti-­apartheid cause abroad.59 It was a galvanizing moment of anti-­apartheid sentiment in the cooperative movement, and it clearly was so for the Cooperative College students who brought a resolution to the Co-­op Party conference midway through the long trial. The resolution called on Cooperative Party MPs to protest officially in Parliament against South Africa’s repressive measures and to demand that the British government raise the issue at the UN. Resolutions like these were important; they raised pressure on politicians to take a stand, and Douglas was an early anti-­apartheid activist. The fact, too, that Cooperative College brought the resolution suggests that Stanford Hall was a space of anti-­colonial and anti-­apartheid activism. Racial and ethnic antagonisms, he argued, put the British Commonwealth project at risk. It would

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not survive if it failed to “continue to be a multi-­racial commonwealth.” It was a problem in the Commonwealth and in Britain, since “the colour bar and racial discrimination” abroad were “only degrees of what exist in our own country.” The cure for the problem came down to the growth of the cooperative movement, because it would bring people together across differences, since “there is nothing in the make-­up of human beings which irrevocably divides them.” He already saw glimmers of the kind of reconciliation he thought cooperatives could create in the Commonwealth and beyond. In the Middle East he thought cooperation seemed poised to reconcile “the differences between Jews and Arabs,” and in Southern Rhodesia an experimental “multi-­racial farm” seemed to herald the possibility of peace and equality there.60 The resolution was well intentioned, but it also took isolated examples out of their wider context. As we have seen in this book, cooperative development was almost nowhere practiced that way. The system developed by the Colonial Office in Africa insisted that “native cooperation” had to be treated differently, legally and within its supervisory control. European settlers in Africa used their cooperatives as economic blocs to gain market advantage over African growers or, like cartels, lower wages for African agricultural workers in an area. The “multi-­racial farm” was a true rarity. There was little to indicate that it was the future of the movement, especially in Southern Rhodesia, eight years away from the settlers’ Universal Declaration of Independence (twenty-­three years away from the victory of the armed struggle that eventually won independence for Zimbabwe). Still, it is difficult to not be inspired by Cooperative College students bringing an argument to the Co-­op Party conference that appealed to delegates to appreciate the semblance between a settler-­colonial society and the postwar colonial metropole. There were other ways of interpreting the metaphysics behind cooperation as an evaporator of prejudice and racism, and some resembled more the kinds of community studies and race relations scripts that focused sociology on the problem of “the migrant.” There was the view of E. Smitherman, who was a leader in the Birmingham Cooperative Party and Women’s Cooperative Guild. At the Cooperative Party conference in 1960—a conference that included both a resolution on race relations and one calling for more cooperative development in Africa— Smitherman acknowledged that there was a difficulty among the rank and file of the cooperative movement in fully appreciating the humanity of non-­white people. The breakthrough in race relations in Britain, she argued, would come out of the success of the cooperative movement in the former colonies. Cooperative development would fix racism by raising living standards, because much of the prejudice, she thought, was really about white Britons seeing others as lesser because of their disadvantaged material conditions. Raise the material state of colonial and former colonial people, and racism would fall away. The cooperative movement in Britain needed to expand efforts to make cooperatives part of “the

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rapid development of the new free countries.” “The purpose of this effort is to raise the standard of living in the countries concerned, but eventually this should benefit co-­operatives in this country,” she argued. “Even in our own country, if we can convince people, in regard to the immigrants that they fear are taking their jobs and homes, that under the skin the blood is the same colour, I think we shall get more and more tolerance.”61 T H E B R I T I SH C O O P E R AT I V E M OV E M E N T A N D A N T I - ­C O L O N IA L P O L I T IC S

Leaving aside how cooperators connected to the late colonial community development mission and what meanings they took from that connection, the rest of this chapter explores the intersections of the British cooperative movement with the politics of decolonization in a different way by thinking about the work of anti-­ colonial and AAM activists to organize inside the cooperative movement and reactions to that work by the cooperative movement at large. The British cooperative movement’s political spaces—its cooperative parties, political committees, and guilds—were not penned off in their own field on issues of empire but rather interacted with a much wider arena of late colonial politics. Cooperators discussed events that were unfolding on the colonial periphery and debated how far the British movement should go in advocating for the end of colonial rule. Activists whose first commitment was the end of colonial rule looked to organize within the British cooperative movement. What did political movements against colonialism see in the British cooperative movement? What limitations and obstacles did they find there? The most important hub of left activism on colonial issues in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s was the MCF. In essence the MCF was a standing committee to connect anti-­colonial movements on the colonial periphery to grassroots support networks in Britain and to shape policy within the labor movement and in Parliament. The MCF was formed in 1954, largely through the efforts of Fenner Brockway and other Left Labour MPs. As we saw in the last chapter, Brockway was an ardent supporter of cooperative development (partly, I suspect, because cooperatives were conceptually an easy fit as an economic formula for the Third Force that he and others in the British and European international socialist Left wanted to form with postcolonial socialist states to counter American and Soviet power and ideology).62 Brockway told fellow MPs in 1952 that “the whole social and economic future of Africa depends upon the development of the co-­operative movement.”63 Having worked with Ignatius Musazi and the UAFU in Uganda, Brockway of course knew that the official cooperative movement in some places was little more than an arm of the state, which undermined the democratic potential of the movement. However, he aspired to the same ideal that was mainstream

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in the British cooperative movement: that members of the British movement, coordinating with the Colonial Office, would go to Africa to advise the nascent cooperative movement there. These cooperative advisers, he predicted, would “be regarded by the African population not as administrators of a Government distant from them but as colleagues with them in the day-­to-­day work of development of the new movement.”64 Brockway was not the only one who thought this way. Economic development and political independence were tied up together in MCF activists’ conceptualization of the late imperial crisis and their postcolonial ideal, and cooperative development was core vocabulary in activist talk about the forms of development there should be under postcolonial democracies.65 But MCF activists also had plans for the cooperative movement in Britain. They wanted to turn it into an ally against colonialism that could come forward with acts of solidarity. There already was support for the anti-­colonial movement among some in the cooperative movement. Some twenty cooperative organizations sent delegates to the founding meeting of the MCF in London in 1954, joining trade union and Labour Party delegates and representatives of groups like the West African Student Union (WASU), Youth Congress of Nigeria, and Uganda National Congress.66 On one level the MCF was a parliamentary pressure group sponsored by one hundred Labour MPs. By the end of the 1950s the MCF had supplanted the Fabian Colonial Bureau in terms of influence on Labour Party colonial policy.67 But the parliamentary side was only one dimension of the organization. Most importantly, it was an activist network with a national membership dedicated to campaigning for an end to “colonialism in all its forms.” It also espoused an anti-­racist, Commonwealth migrant rights agenda for Britain, and it was one of the key organizations that, working with South African exiles, brought together the anti-­apartheid solidarity movement in Britain. By the end of the 1950s, the MCF had more than three million individual members and more than five hundred affiliated regional and local organizations. The presence of MCF activists within existing organizations was key to its recruitment and to its campaign tactics related to specific colonial struggles. MCF activists went into their organizations and recruited and distributed literature at meetings of unions, among the Young Socialists, and to many other groups.68 The cooperative movement early on was identified as one of the most important targets, necessitating a dedicated subcommittee to manage the outreach. Delegates from cooperative organizations frequently attended MCF Area Council meetings throughout the country. Local co-­op political committees, Co-­op Party branches, and Women’s Cooperative Guild branches signed on as affiliate organizations. Important early leaders bridging the MCF and LCS included Maeve Miller, Arthur Urbanski, and John and Barbara Stonehouse (the last two had gone to Uganda to support the independent cooperative movement there). Starting in 1957, with Miller managing the day-­to-­day work, these and other volunteers began a concerted campaign

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to convince cooperative organizations to affiliate with the MCF and commit to its specific solidarity campaigns.69 This effort paid political dividends. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s the MCF added new affiliations from London area cooperative organizations almost every month. If there was a culmination to all this outreach work inside the LCS, it was when Urbanski and others convinced delegates at the 1961 London Co-­op Party conference to officially endorse the MCF. The conference gave overwhelming support to an expression of support, but cooperators debated how far they should go with it, and the issue was not taken up at the national party conference. It is worth taking time to think about the debate. Urbanski’s resolution called on the conference to appeal “to cooperative organisations all over this country to support the Movement for Colonial Freedom in its work for liberation of those Nations still under Colonial rule and to affiliate to the Movement wherever this is possible.” The resolution emphasized Africa, specifying that in vast parts of the continent—in Kenya, Algeria, Congo, Angola, and Mozambique—“the enforcement of colonial rule” was “one of the main sources of political friction and one of the gravest dangers to world peace.” Urbanski told the conference attendees that he had lived in Africa and had seen firsthand that struggles for liberation were born out of colonial people’s experiences of “degradation and humiliation.” He anchored his call to action in the history of the labor movement and cooperative movement. “I am a Co-­operator,” he told them, “and Co-­operation is part and parcel of Socialism. I am an anti-­Colonialist as I do not believe in the imposition of Colonialism in the twentieth century, nor do I believe in the sort of neo-­Colonialism which today constitutes one of the main threats to peace.” The British labor movement was letting people down in their struggle. A true cooperator needed to be, like him, “a free crusader” for the anti-­colonial movement. The British labor movement’s shortcomings had cost much ground in the world struggle against empire, but it could still make good by joining the ranks. And besides, there was a great opportunity for the cooperative movement at home to grow by attaching itself to the anti-­colonial movement. Leaders of the Cooperative Party were worried about the lack of youth participation. Colonial liberation was “a goal worth striving for” that would activate young “progressive people.” Others at the conference joined Urbanski in affirming that they, too, believed that their commitments to the cooperative movement and to the labor movement converged with a new commitment to colonial liberation. There was mild pushback from some delegates. Mr. C. Lacey, representing North Hammersmith cooperators, agreed with the aspiration behind the anti-­colonial movement and with the broad call in the motion to “support” the MCF, but he worried about that last line asking organizations to actually affiliate with the MCF “wherever possible.” Wasn’t that going too far? He thought it would “probably put some people on a spot.” He did not elaborate, but the request to strike the more specific and substantial call to

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action seems like a good indication that leaders were concerned that there would be a cost to being associated too closely with the anti-­colonial movement. This shows how cooperators grappled with trying to fit the democratic, anti-­racist rhetoric of the cooperative movement with an existing political reality that there was still a good deal of pro-­empire sentiment among the membership. The debate is repeated in the cooperative movement’s political spaces. We hear it as well when cooperative organizations weighed whether and to what degree to boycott South Africa. The promise of their abstract theory of the cooperative movement as a natural ally to human rights and multiracial democracy came up against the reality of a membership with sections at least that were deeply invested in the racial hierarchies of a colonial world order now under threat by anti-­colonial movements. Should the cooperative movement boycott if it meant losing those customers? Despite Lacey’s concern, when it came to a vote the conference attendees agreed to keep in the language about affiliations, and the motion passed with just one delegate voting against it. That one “nay” vote was presumably the delegate from the Chadwell Heath party, Mr. Warr, who objected to the resolution and may have won the award for least popular opinion at that day’s proceedings. The response to Warr makes it easy to pinpoint the democratic socialist but decidedly anti-­communist political center of the Cooperative Party and the MCF. Warr implored party delegates to see that “this is not a question of colour” (though he was against “any colour bar and any fascist movement”) and that the real struggle was not really about colonial rule but class warfare. The only way to establish “socialism and the Co-­operative Commonwealth,” he argued, was by fanning the flames of worldwide worker revolt against capitalist rulers. He was met with jeers and shouts of “rubbish” when he said that in places recently freed from British rule—Ghana, India, and Pakistan—new leaders were imprisoning political dissenters “under the cloak of socialism” and argued that this was proving that the new leaders are “worse than those they kicked out.” Urbanski’s reply illustrates for the activist culture in the MCF and the cooperative movement the often self-­ contradictory and paternalistic ways of seeing the relationship between the British left and anticolonial movements in the decolonizing world. He acknowledged that effective politics had to be rooted in local struggle, yet the ideology had to flow southward from a European center of radical working-­class history through benevolent, radical teachers. Class struggle in the colonies, Urbanski argued, needed to remain “the business of the colonial people themselves,” and British cooperators should not take part in that struggle. He added, “We must provide the ideology they need” for their own battle against capitalism.70 Besides the formal affiliations and pledges of support, what practical forms did the cooperative engagement with MCF take? Cooperators attended MCF meetings, where they took part in discussions of strategy for MCF campaigns that often focused on situations of emergency rule and political repression in various

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parts of the empire.71 MCF meetings in London were typically attended by several delegates from Co-­op Party branches and delegates from Women’s Cooperative Guild branches.72 Cooperative members took part in MCF-­sponsored rallies and special events, like the party at the House of Commons in early March 1957 to celebrate Ghana’s Independence Day (at which John Corina, chair of the Cooperative Union, gave a speech).73 There were more routine collaborations. The LCS subscribed to the MCF Speakers Service, which sent informed speakers on colonial issues to meetings of local organizations. Africa was by far the most popular topic.74 The MCF also organized “One-­Day Schools” on colonial policy, and London cooperators participated in them.75 During the South Africa boycott campaign the MCF provided cooperative shops with “A–Z” lists of banned goods. The MCF helped set the agenda for policy discussion, suggesting to cooperators when and how to drive motions through their political committees and party conventions to try to force debate on specific struggles of colonial liberation.76 Galvanizing events brought end-­of-­empire war and political repression into focus for cooperators. The war in Kenya to defend settler colonial society was an important one, prompting resolutions in the Co-­op Party that expressed shock at both the Mau Mau anti-­colonial fighters and the reactionary colonial authority operating under emergency orders and drew attention to the problem of land rights and anti-­African political repression. There were resolutions to end the war in Malaya. The controversy over the Central African Federation was a galvanizing moment for the anti-­colonial Left in the early 1950s, including inside the cooperative movement. In 1952 the London Co-­op Party discussed plans for the Federation and the Conservative government’s failure “to understand the national aspirations of the African peoples” (though the Federation was originally a Labour plan). The LCS political committee published a statement of concern and encouraged cooperators to attend a mass demonstration in London “when the voice of Africa would be heard.”77 During the following year the LCS political committee worked with a “representative committee” of movement organizations to mobilize public opinion against federation, and the national Co-­op Party passed a resolution demanding that the government consult “with the representatives of the native peoples” before enacting any plan.78 Activist cooperators continued to follow events in Central Africa throughout the decade. In 1959, the LCS and the South Suburban Cooperative Political Committee worked with the MCF to organize several meetings to discuss the anti-­ colonial struggle in Central Africa.79 During the 1950s anti-­apartheid activism gained traction in Britain across a broad spectrum of Left and liberal politics. This growing support was catalyzed by the highly publicized outrages of the apartheid regime as it cracked down on activists who defied the state’s segregationist laws through innumerable, diffuse acts of individual resistance and through major campaigns of Gandhi-­inspired

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noncooperation following the lead of the ANC. The state jailed thousands of resisters who took part in the ANC’s Campaign of Defiance of Unjust Laws, launched in 1952.80 To match the direct actions by dissidents in South Africa, the ANC pursued a strategy to apply international pressure on the regime by calling for a boycott, asking British consumers and consumers everywhere to stop purchasing South African products. The anti-­apartheid movement, like anti-­colonial activism as a whole, needed galvanizing moments to bring it periodically into focus for cooperators. Elizabeth Mafeking’s daring escape from South Africa in 1959 provided an early moment through which activists—focusing on the Women’s Cooperative Guild—were able to get the attention of cooperators. As protests in South Africa against the National Party government intensified during the 1950s, Mafeking rose to prominence as a leader in the labor movement and a protester against the pass laws that imposed restrictions on the movement of Africans. The pass laws were integral to the apartheid system; they were designed to control the movement of Africans, especially into urban areas. Mafeking was president of the African Food and Canning Workers Union, and she also was national vice president of the Women’s League of the African National Congress. National Party officials labeled her “ ‘the most dangerous threat to native administration’ in the Western Cape.”81 In 1959, without a hearing, the government issued orders to separate her from her family, including her children, and to send her to a remote location some six hundred miles from her home. The banishment order drew international press attention, and Mafeking’s allies abroad rallied support. Before the police could execute the order, Mafeking escaped with her youngest child to Basutoland, a British High Commission Territory (now Lesotho), where she remained for the next three decades.82 She became the most well-­known of a growing number of exiles who had fled the apartheid regime to seek refuge in one of the three British enclave protectorates surrounded by South Africa: Basutoland, Bechuanaland, and Swaziland. A campaign mounted by Mafeking’s allies in London, including the Trade Union Congress, brought pressure on the British government to defy the apartheid regime’s demands to return Mafeking.83 The MCF mobilized its activist army to support her and also raised awareness that—while Makefing herself had so far remained free from South African authorities—other dissidents had been abducted and returned. The organizing within the Women’s Cooperative Guild resulted in the national leadership appealing to all the Women’s Guild branches in the UK to ask them to commit funds for Mafeking.84 The Women’s Guild at the national level was one of the political spaces in the cooperative movement—along with the LCS’s Political Committee—where the AAM found a decent amount of support in the early years of the movement. In 1960 the guild accepted an invitation to join the AAM’s National Committee, and subsequently numerous small donations came in from various guild branches.

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The Women’s Cooperative Guild also passed a resolution at its annual conference the same year calling for immediate steps to be taken to advance the boycott.85 Rita Smythe of the Women’s Guild was among the speakers at the fifteen-­thousand-­ person rally at Trafalgar Square on February 28 that launched the month of boycott in March 1960.86 It was the high-­water mark of success for the boycott campaign in Britain, which would not be reached again in the next two decades. It looked like a precarious moment for South Africa’s National Party. Newly independent Commonwealth states were agitating against South Africa’s membership. The treason trial of the 156 anti-­apartheid activists was ongoing, followed closely in media around the world. With pressure inside and outside South Africa mounting, the National Party government intensified its campaign of repression and state violence. While the month of boycott was still taking place, in Sharpeville on March 21, police fired more than a thousand rounds of ammunition into a crowd that had gathered to protest the pass laws; sixty-­nine people were killed, many while running away from the bullets.87 The Sharpeville massacre, more than any other event of the era, would come to symbolize the brutality of apartheid. As headlines about the massacre engulfed world media, it is easy to see how it might have looked like a tipping point at which the ANC’s strategy of swaying public opinion might finally break through.88 Surely now there would be boycotts everywhere, unrelenting until the regime was destroyed (but of course that proved not to be the case). “A C O L O U R BA R AT A C O - ­O P ? ”

It was against the backdrop of that moment of rising anti-­apartheid activism in Britain that in July 1960, just three months after the month of boycott took place and then ended, a twenty-­one-­year old Indian man, Ramanlal Bhanabhai, responded to an ad for a job as a baker’s roundsman at the suburban Palmers Green depot of the LCS. In the vast national network of co-­op shops that were the mainstay of the British cooperative movement, the LCS was the largest, with more than a million members and many shops scattered across London. The home delivery of bread from the LCS’s own bakeries like the one at Palmers Green was an important part of its business. A roundsman’s work involved taking a cart or a van through neighborhoods and then walking house to house with a basket loaded up with loaves and other bakery goods and either greeting customers at the door and handing them their order or leaving it on the doorstep. What Bhanabhai did not know—what was not mentioned in the ad—was that the LCS had a racist internal policy that only white people could be roundsmen. When he went to apply, Bhanabhai was turned away and told by management that it was because he was “coloured.”89 Bhanabhai was deeply hurt. The co-­op was supposed to be better than this. Bhanabhai thought about the anti-­apartheid boycott. What had happened to the co-­op’s commitment to racial equality? Though in the end the co-­op’s participation

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Figure 4. “A Colour Bar at a Co-­op?,” Daily Mirror cartoon, July 1960. The Daily Mirror was the first paper to run Bhanabhai’s story and followed up with another article and this cartoon, which chided LCS management for yielding to the racism of its customers. Reynolds News (a cooperatively owned Sunday paper) and the Daily Worker also covered the story, as did several other London-­area papers. Source: Mirrorpix/Reach Licensing.

in the month of boycott was much more limited than activists had hoped—­leaving it to individual customers and shop managers to choose whether to boycott when activists wanted the co-­op’s wholesalers to stop purchasing apartheid products altogether—it still became widely known that the co-­op was boycotting. That is what Bhanabhai believed, and he found the hypocrisy appalling. When he hit back by going to the press with his story, he emphasized the hypocrisy. He told the Daily Mirror reporter, “I do not see the sense in the Co-­op boycotting South African goods because of the colour bar when they themselves practice the same thing.” Bhanabhai had all but written the damning headline that conjured the specter of white supremacist colonial society in the heart of progressive Britain: “A Colour Bar at a Co-­op?”90

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The story caused a stir, and for the next several weeks LCS elected officers were forced to defend the co-­op to the press and to its own members and left-­ wing, anti-­racism activists. Almost as soon as the news broke, the MCF sent a concerned letter to the LCS.91 The LCS management committee responded to criticism by reaffirming that the LCS stood by the principle “that all applicants for employment be treated on the same basis, irrespective of race or colour,” tasking a subcommittee to “consider the manner in which this decision is to be operated.”92 Meanwhile, the LCS put out confusing and contradictory statements that attempted to deny the color bar charge while at the same time acknowledging that only white people were employed as roundsmen as a matter of deliberate policy. At the society’s next general members meeting, LCS president George Frederick Dutch dismissed the color bar talk as a deplorable smear carried out by a single newspaper based on an accusation from just one person.93 He reassured members that their co-­op had “never followed a racial policy” and that they “employed for years past hundreds of coloured people through all our departments.”94 However, in other statements it was clear that in fact there had been a decision made to only employ white workers on rounds. The LCS had done what it called “experiments” in customer reactions. These showed that there was “very little unfavourable consumer reaction” at brick-­and-­mortar shops “where coloured staff work alongside white colleagues,” since at the shop a customer acting on racial prejudice could simply choose to conduct their business with a white person on staff. However, on rounds, “where the choice of alternative assistants are [sic] not available,” there was “sufficient strong reaction from a minority of our customers to deter us from continuing the experiments.”95 What Bhana­ bhai’s story laid bare was that for all its gestures of anti-­racist solidarity, when it came to a conflict between those ideals and its business, the LCS was a business first. Rather than lose customers, the LCS accommodated the racist preferences of members who did not want non-white people in their neighborhoods and on their doorsteps. The co-­op’s myths said that the space of the cooperative could break down racist mentalities, but instead the consumer side of the “Cooperative Commonwealth” was calculated to allow members to keep on acting on their racism without any inconvenience. This episode reveals how the myths the cooperative movement was writing about its progressive postwar role could be buoyed up by “cooperation in the colonies,” confirming Perry’s argument about the broad investment of Britons in sustaining the mystique of British anti-­racism and defending it in moments when the realities of deep and wide racism in British society and institutions threatened to be exposed. There was nothing in the facts of Bhanabhai’s story that had anything directly to do with colonial cooperation, and yet in its statements to the press and to its own members over several weeks, the LCS tried to produce doubt about the color bar charge by emphasizing the co-­op’s connection to British-­led,

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Figure 5. Anti-Apartheid Movement leaflet for month of the boycott, March 1960. “Co-operative Organisations” are listed as backers of the boycott. Source: Anti-Apartheid Movement Archive.

community development in the colonial world. How could the co-op be institutionally prejudiced against Commonwealth migrants when cooperators “from India, Africa, and Asia” sometimes trained with LCS staff so they could “ultimately introduce British Co-operative trading methods in their own country”?96 And wasn’t the fact that the LCS had recently set up a fund to support cooperators in Tanganyika further proof of the co-op’s progressive commitments and thus the

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impossibility that it could operate a color bar?97 The LCS had even given the fund its own dividend number—369—so that any co-­op customer could easily donate when paying for their own groceries. Or what about the fact that “African guests, representing the Co-­operative movement in their own countries” had attended the society’s recent International Cooperative Day celebration in London’s Festival Gardens?98 The truth that Bhanabhai uncovered challenged core elements of the co-­op’s postwar brand of ethical consumerism: pro-­worker, anti-­racist friend to Commonwealth newcomers to Britain.99 In a situation that threatened

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to diminish the brand, the spectacle of community development through cooperation was called upon to repair it. In concluding this chapter I want to return to the March 1960 boycott and discuss more about what the co-­op did and did not do there. An interesting point in Bhanabhai’s account of what he experienced at the Palmer’s Green bakery is how already in 1960 the narrative about the co-­op’s commitment to the boycott cause was being inscribed as if it were fact, so much so that Bhanabhai was surprised by the hypocrisy. It is that narrative of committed consumer activism against apartheid that sticks. Today the cooperative movement celebrates its history of solidarity with the AAM. The commemoration of anti-­apartheid activism in the British cooperative movement is based on real experiences. Stories of everyday acts of solidarity are inspiring and leave no doubt that there was significant energy in parts of the movement to have a real commitment to support the struggle. Following Nelson Mandela’s death in 2013, Co-­op News published firsthand accounts by cooperators who had gotten involved. Elaine Dean recollected how as a teenager in the early 1960s she heard the story of Nelson Mandela’s persecution and was pushed to act: For my part, I wrote letters to influential people or went into greengrocer’s shops, filled my basket with South African goods and queued up. When I got to the till I asked the country of origin of the fruit and, told it was South Africa, I tipped the basket up so the fruit rolled everywhere and said: “Oh no, I can’t buy fruit from a country that practises apartheid,” and walked out. I got banned from many stores for doing this. The one place I didn’t and couldn’t do it was at the Co-­op because the Movement was in the vanguard of the boycott: that is one of the things I am most proud about.100

Dean’s is only one memory, and it offers only a partial view of the reality of the cooperative movement’s anti-­apartheid position in the 1960s. What are we to make of other stories, in which the co-­op looks less like a natural ally to the cause and even seems resistant to it? When we go back to the biggest moment of solidarity—­the March 1960 boycott action (Dean’s story is from a few years later)—we find a very uneven story. Some management committees did indeed act just like the shop managers Dean describes, taking South African goods off the shelf. But there also were plenty of shops, including in the LCS, that refused to participate in the boycott, apparently out of fear of a backlash from customers who would be offended by it.101 Mr. Montague Jennings had a story of his own individual act of solidarity, but it took place in an LCS store. He told a meeting of the Brentford and Chiswick Trades Council in 1960, “ ‘I was surprised to find a tin of South African peaches in my groceries the other day. . . . I soon sent them back again. But it seems ridiculous that the goods are sold in its shops when the Co-­operative movement is supposed to be opposed to apartheid.’ ”102

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Mr. D. J. Winnick of West Willesden thought the co-­op’s claim to any significant role in the boycott was laughable. “The majority of Co-­operative shops during the boycott campaign in March ignored it,” he told delegates at the annual meeting of the London Cooperative Party. He continued: “There was no difference between Co-­operative shops and privately owned shops. We expected our own shops to give a lead, thus demonstrating our hatred of racial differences. We thought that after the massacre of Africans there would have been disagreement [sic] about the issue; but South African goods were being sold all through March, and they are still being sold although the boycott continues and will continue until apartheid is abolished in South Africa.”103 Mr. Mugaseth of Hornsey scoffed at the official line taken by LCS officers that the LCS political committee had given its “‘full support to the Boycott’” (out of statements like these the myth is made). Muga­ seth objected: “Had you been at the sectional meetings last year you would have discovered that the word ‘support’ was being followed in brackets by ‘Ha, ha.’ There was one wishy-­washy speech at the meeting I attended and another speaker thought this move was Communist inspired.”104 As these stories make clear, far from being an unwavering ally in the struggle, the co-­op’s institutional and grassroots commitment to anti-­apartheid—even at the height of boycott activism in 1960—was weak. We should consider the consequences of that. The anti-­apartheid movement put great hope in the strategy of consumer boycott. However, the long arc of that strategy was first a brief, flash-­in-­ the-­pan moment of activism in the early 1960s and then a weakening of support for several decades until the watershed breakthrough of the 1980s.105 A big reason that the consumer boycott failed to take off for so long in Britain was that the British cooperative movement failed to support it. The AAM organizers hoped and believed that cooperatives would be natural allies in the consumer boycott. But that proved not to be the case.106 Throughout the 1960s and 1970s AAM groups kept going back to the cooperative movement for support, but they only had limited success. The AAM produced leaflets on the co-­op’s boycott record and placed material in Co-­op News, and local groups lobbied store managers and members and picketed individual co-­ops. The AAM’s greatest success was convincing the Birmingham society and the LCS to pull South African goods from the shelves for one week in March 1978. It was only in 1985 that the CWS would finally decide to stop purchasing South African goods completely.107 As I think about these failures, plotting them as part of the story of the politics of decolonization in the British cooperative movement, the concept that keeps coming to mind is “ideology lessons.” Urbanski, who was, to be fair, a committed boycott supporter, said that British cooperators had to provide the ideology for people in the colonies. That has been a refrain in this book: the surety that experts, missionaries, and British cooperators had that they knew how to use cooperatives

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and that Africans and others needed to be trained. I see the boycott as a lesson offered by Africans to British cooperators, turning the didactic relationship around as if to say: “Appreciate the decolonial possibilities of your cooperative when you turn them into a boycott tool against colonial systems.” AAM activists wanted to teach British cooperators how to use cooperatives for liberation from colonial systems. Unfortunately, cooperators were easily able to see themselves in relation to the decolonizing world but usually only as teachers, not learners. The cooperative movement was in a unique position to really contribute to the boycott movement at a critical moment, and in comparison to colonial situations, the British movement had an incredible amount of political breathing room to take bold steps. In Uganda, where Ganda farmers faced the full force of police and military power in emergency imperial defense mode, they used cooperatives to organize a boycott that threatened the colonial order. In the colonial metropole, cooperatives faced no such political obstacles. They had political parties attached to the movement and political committees. There were no sedition laws or emergency orders. They were hindered only by the racism and apathy of their members and the fear of lost business (the same factors that in 1960 made it possible for an Indian man to be denied work at a co-­op bakery). The “bonds of empire” still bound the cooperative movement.

Conclusion

“No one recognizes more thoroughly than I do what a tedious and labourious task it is to explain thoroughly the scheme, day after day, to slow-­witted rustics.” That was how the first Registrar of Cooperative Societies for Punjab, S. Wilberforce, summed up the work of cooperative rural reconstruction in 1906 as it was just beginning—some twenty years before Strickland would become its apostle to the wider empire.1 The scheme. The colonizer’s gift. Wilberforce thought of it as his own personal share of the “white man’s burden” to shoulder—as in the Kipling poem, it was “the end for others sought.” But that was never how empire worked. Empire’s schemes were designed to rule. The cooperative movement was no different. When it was worked into colonial systems, it became cooperative rule. It was supposed to give colonial states a new agency for planning development and a new organizing power in rural life: the ability to form new community groups to carry out development campaigns determined by British power, intended to shore up British power. It promised the ability to carve out new community spaces that would work through built-­in disciplinary routines to shape the subjects within them to be receptive to the didactic messages of paternalistic British rulers who sought a conversion of hearts and minds. Recall that Strickland, carried away in admiring the system, described it as “a means of permeating the whole sociology of the people [of Africa and Asia] . . . with a completely new set of ideas and reconstructing their life.”2 This book has been about that system of cooperative development and the colonial politics surrounding it during the middle decades of the twentieth century as it moved from ICS rural planning to eventually become the centerpiece of British community development. At the heart of the book has been the idea that 175

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we gain a clear historical picture of what British colonial development was about during the late colonial era by looking closely at its cooperative center and at how cooperatives were theorized by government experts and by missionaries and how they interacted with specific colonial situations. Cooperative development epitomized the turn to community in colonial governmentality. In this we see British claims to rule crystallizing into a new community development mission in which British colonial power was figured as organizing and guiding community-­funded, community-­driven modernization. In detailing the story of how cooperatives were crafted into colonial technopolitics I have stressed the importance of colonial cooperation’s anchoring in the rural reconstruction projects of the ICS during the first decades of the twentieth century. This is not just to add an earlier, British-­imperial counterweight to studies of community development that have emphasized the later Cold War era and the influence of US foreign policy. My argument has been that cooperation’s early exploration as technopolitics in the British Raj, particularly in Punjab Province, shaped how it would later appear in different colonial development contexts and how it would play out in late colonial politics. That model of cooperation that was transferred as political technology to other places in the empire had acquired elements in India—such as the powerful Registrar—that made it contentious in places where it was copied. British India was also where cooperatives were first conceived as technical fixes to crises of social change and where they were first embedded in the pedagogies of community development. That way of framing cooperative development traveled with it. As cooperative development was studied, recommended, and applied elsewhere in the empire, there was an enduring tendency among officials, experts, and missionaries to see cooperatives as community-­level bindings that could stabilize disintegrating social structure and as an indispensable core of community-development–focused education. These arguments were especially powerful in shaping the form development took in late colonial British Africa, the most important proving ground for colonial planners as development became the new rationale for empire. In colonial administrations in Africa and in the Colonial Office, ideas about cooperative development were seen as answers to a fundamental crisis of community wherein the political systems relied upon by indirect rule would collapse if new community bindings could not be found. I have tried throughout the book to underscore the variety of influences that came to bear on how cooperative rural reconstruction was packaged and presented as development, especially for Africa. Specific colonial states often had their own particular uses for cooperatives, usually arising from what their own officials saw as the immediate local crises of colonial order or from a tendency in the Depression era for administrators to search for self-­help solutions as inexpensive social welfare. In terms of setting the grand vision, Strickland was important. It mattered that he had backers in the Colonial Office; that he had won converts in

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administrations in Nigeria and Tanganyika Territory; and that the most authoritative voice of all during the interwar years on colonial government, Lord Lugard, bought into Strickland’s idealized system. But in Africa, given that community development was essentially a set of projects of rural education, and given the primacy of missionary societies in organizing educational systems, it mattered just as much that important missionaries and missionary society leaders like Joseph Oldham, J. W. C. Dougall, and Bernard Huss were captivated by cooperation. They shared some common aims with colonial government and were enthusiastic about Strickland’s vision of cooperatives as a means of social transformation (including the economy of it). But community development was inflected differently for missionaries, who saw it as part of the advance of a social gospel. Missionaries put their stamp on the package of community development, including how they understood and treated cooperatives. More than anyone else it was missionaries—already primed to see themselves as engineers of moral conversion but now influenced by new trends in American educational theory (Dewey’s “new education” as well as racially “adapted” education)—who insisted that the cooperative was an ideal space for inculcating the improving lessons of community development. Cooperatives became project lessons. T. G. Benson, who succeeded Dougall as principal of the flagship Jeanes school campus in Kenya, remarked in 1936 that “all our best-­laid schemes are futile unless the people for whom they are made see the meaning of them, welcome them, take them to themselves, ‘chew them up and digest them.’ ”3 At the Jeanes school and in communities where Jeanes teachers had a strong presence, the cooperative shop was deployed as one of the main project lessons precisely because it was thought to make community development schemes (and the colonial ideology embedded in them) more “chewable” and “digestible.” But plans and schemes were just plans and schemes. The story I have traced is one that sees the best laid plans for colonial cooperatives contested or repurposed for different and competing political uses and invested with other ideologies, with the language of community development and cooperation either taken over and adapted or parodied to mock the avowed good intentions of colonial developers. The independent cooperative movement of Uganda cotton and coffee farmers in the late 1940s and early 1950s rejected British community developers’ framing of colonial power in the way they understood and took on the cooperative system. The farmers insisted they were the “true cooperators.” The Registrar was figured as a dictator, the strong arm of a repressive colonial state masquerading as a helping hand. His staff of cooperative assistants were seen as bullies and spies for the colonial state. Whereas Governor Hall’s development plan factored cooperatives as an optimal propaganda channel, a direct link between the state and farmer groups, the Ganda farmers used their cooperative union as a subversive propaganda channel to organize a boycott.

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This book has not been just about technocratic plans, the development discourses that shaped them, and late colonial contests over their implementation. It also has been about how cooperative development became a transportable symbol of British-­led but community-­driven colonial modernization, one that could be used to make a variety of arguments about the kind of social and political order that should emerge from colonial development and how colonial subjects and metropolitan citizens should see themselves in it. By the postwar era community development had become a potent discursive assemblage that seemed to appear everywhere, and the cooperative movement in the colonies was its key signifier. Colonial community development could be used to hide the uglier aspects of late colonialism in the empire and metropole. It could be used as cover for a colour bar at a co-­op in London. By a cinema trick it could be superimposed on emergency rule to make its violence disappear. If a film like Daybreak in Udi seems innocuous as a cultural product of colonial ideology, consider its counterpart in the genre of community development British documentary, the Malayan Film Unit’s A New Life: Squatter Resettlement (1951), which showed that British-­led community development could as easily build a resettlement village under military control as it could a maternity hospital. The film was made during the Malayan Emergency and was a propaganda film promoting the military’s new measures to forcibly relocate Chinese villagers who were seen as security threats. Uprooted from their homes, when they arrived at the site of the New Villages they were made to build their new homes themselves, while soldiers with guns stood all around. The short film, which toured via mobile cinema vans, shot the construction of one of the New Villages from the ground up and presented it as an example of community development, emphasizing the collective effort it took to build and how the vil­ lagers were improving their own lives through ongoing strategies of self-­help. One scene shows the villagers shopping at a co-­op shop built to serve several villages.4 Part of what gave the spectacle of community development its coherence (and for some its emotional appeal) was how it represented the project of empire through the rhetorics of teaching and learning. In Africa, community development framed the content of school lessons and mobile cinema shows, inviting Africans to appreciate the kind of modernity that British rulers imagined for them and to reorganize their daily practices to fit it. The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment used cooperatives to argue that following British teachers of development and heeding their advice would lead to prosperity, signaling as well that a multitude of British consumers were just waiting to buy their products if only they would cultivate and market them to fit their high British standards. Daybreak in Udi’s emotional payoff for audiences in Britain was that it depicted Africans as students working through a project lesson, and late imperial Britons wanted to see themselves as teachers. Teacher of self-­help was an especially appealing identity for postwar Britons to put on and perform, whether close to the scene

Conclusion    179

of development or at a distance in the colonial metropole taking part in forms of popular imperialism that clustered around the new development mission. In his memoir covering his time in Uganda, John Stonehouse describes going to advise a group of maize farmers, members of the Uganda African Farmers Union. He is horrified to discover that two godowns that needed to be built to store an expected bumper crop were not nearly ready. Stonehouse gives the farmers “a little speech,” encourages them to speed up the work, and explains the importance of the godowns to their bigger goals. He feels good that he has set the project back on track. Later he reflects with satisfaction about the progress to come from Africans learning self-­help (from him): I felt a comradeship with my African hosts that transcended the different worlds from which we had come. Theirs was the age-­old struggle against poverty and ignorance, although only recently had the Africans begun to wage the battle with any enthusiasm. How much better, I thought, that they should win it as self-­reliant individuals, able to reap the rewards and help in guiding the course of events. How much better that they should have a share in shaping their own destiny rather than be buffeted by primitive forces or cosseted by western paternalism throughout their lives.5

Finally, one of the goals of this book has been to stretch the analytical frame around community development discourse to think about how it appeared and worked in the politics of late empire and decolonization in Britain. There is a moment in Ken Loach’s cinematic homage to Labour’s postwar program, The Spirit of ’45, that captures how a working-­class person in Britain saw the idea of socialist development after the war. Dot Gibson, general secretary of the National Pensioners’ Convention when Loach’s film was made, recalls a conversation that she had with her father when she was ten: My father was not an active trade unionist or anything. He got a map of the world and he put it on the table and he said, “Look.” He said, “They grow wheat here. You get rubber from here. You get oil from here. And you get fruit from here. What we’re looking for is an integrated world system where everybody has what they need and everything is developed for everybody.” I thought that was absolutely amazing. He said to me, “It’s called socialism.” And you know, as a kid of ten, I thought it was absolutely amazing, and I still do.6

That idea of development as building “an integrated world system” for the benefit of all the world’s people was part of the everyday vernacular of postwar democratic socialism in Britain. It could be easily conjured to relate the labor movement in Britain to a regenerative world project based on human rights, social uplift, and democracy. When Labour’s Colonial Office tried to give concrete substance to what the British labor movement meant by development, it promoted community development and the idea that the British empire was leading a cooperative movement. British cooperators were interpolated into colonial community

180     Conclusion

Figure 6. United Kingdom Information Office window display, Dar es Salaam, 1960. The UKIO put up this window display the year before Tanzania’s independence. One can read it as a late imperial propaganda variation on the commodity map of the world. The titles, in English and Swahili, continue to pull from the development rhetorics of teaching and learning, now reframed as Commonwealth: “Products of the Commonwealth: Australian Foods: From some of the world’s most experienced Food producers.” Source: The National Archives of the UK, ref. CO 1027/522.

development in an exceptional way, and thinking about the development imaginary that took hold inside the cooperative movement has revealed some of the subtle ways that development worked as colonial ideology in the late imperial metropole. Colonial cooperation gave many cooperators a meaningful way to imagine themselves as part of a redeemed colonial mission, one that was supposed to be vanquishing poverty, lifting standards of living, and training people in how to practice democracy and development. The Colonial Office framed cooperative development as a project of shaping democratic subjects. The postwar British cooperative movement, taking that premise at face value despite the prevailing situations of emergency rule and the absence of democracy throughout the British empire, planted roots for the argument in its own narratives about the nineteenth-­century British working class overcoming the power of capitalists through self-­help and the practical democracy of the co-­op shop. Meanwhile

Conclusion    181

British cooperators generated new narratives about the movement’s natural resistance to racism and its welcoming stance toward Commonwealth newcomers that ran well out in front of where the movement actually was. Some saw, or at least wanted to see, the cooperative movement as helping to push Britain and the world beyond the age of imperialism. But decolonial lessons about cooperatives were difficult for British cooperators to learn, as helpful as it would have been to anti-­ colonial liberation movements if British cooperators could have learned them.

Note s

I N T R O DU C T IO N

1.  I draw on recent framings of development and modernization as performance and spectacle. Stephan Miescher, Peter Bloom, and Takyiwaa Manuh write that “ ‘modernization as spectacle’ ” in Africa was “performance, ideology, and public enactment” tied to state-­led modernization. “By extension,” they argue, “emerging independence-­era leaders across the African continent rearticulated the significance and objectives of infrastructure and cultural projects.” Stephan Miescher, Peter Bloom, and Takyiwaa Manuh, introduction to Modernization as Spectacle in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 1. Brian Larkin has analyzed how the sublime in modernizing projects, especially technological projects, was produced as “a necessary spectacle of colonial rule” in Africa. Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 36. In his study of US development in Asia, Nick Cullather writes of the “performance of development” in which “projects were designed for ‘display’ to produce statistical victories or as carefully staged spectacles dramatizing the fruits of modernity.” Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 5. 2.  On the Bandung Conference and its importance in charting the path of international solidarity for Asia and Africa during the Cold War, see the essays in Christopher Lee, ed., Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019). Studies of community development include Tania Murray Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Cullather, The Hungry World; and Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). Immerwahr’s book takes stock of the mid-­twentieth-­ century moment when community development rose to prominence, emphasizing how 183

184     Notes communitarian ideas about “bottom-­up” and “grassroots” development often were entangled with notions of big development that are more typically identified as modernization. As Immerwahr observes of the intellectual underpinnings of community development in mid-­twentieth-­century US foreign policy for the Global South: “The urge to modernize and the quest for community were not the doctrines of warring camps. They were rival impulses, felt sometimes by the same people simultaneously, coiled tightly around each other, often tangled together.” Immerwahr, Thinking Small, 8. 3.  Lugard’s comment appears in his introduction to Claude Francis Strickland, Co-­ operation for Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), vii–viii. Lugard’s military conquests secured the British empire in East Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, but his imprint on the doctrine of indirect rule as applied to Africa stemmed from his experience as governor of Nigeria. His book, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (London: Blackwood, 1922), was the authoritative work on the principles of indirect rule. Phillip Zachernuk has discussed Lugard’s comment and the appeal of cooperatives to British rulers who, concerned about the effects of African social change in the 1930s, found in them “an ideal mixture of African communalism and modern economics” that “would gently rework the natural African order without violating racial characteristics.” Philip S. Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 118. 4.  Colonial developers in India often premised their claims about the usefulness of promoting cooperatives on the idea of their affinity with village communities. The first such argument in print appears to have been made by H. Dupernex in People’s Banks for Northern India: A Handbook to the Organization of Credit on a Co-­operative Basis (Calcutta, 1900). For discussion of the relevant passages see I. J. Catanach, Rural Credit in Western India, 1875–1930: Rural Credit and the Co-­operative Movement in the Bombay Presidency (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 45–46. 5.  Studies that have examined the cooperative movement and its global spread have recognized and explored some of the significant British-­imperial connections involved. In recent articles, Nikolay Kamenov has sought to reassess the global history of the cooperative movement, underscoring the heavy role of the state in cooperation in India and Africa and how cooperation historically has been compatible with colonialism and capitalism. See Nikolay Kamenov, “Imperial Cooperative Experiments and Global Market Capitalism, c. 1900–c.1960,” Journal of Global History 14, no. 2 (2019): 219–237 and Kamenov, “The Place of the ‘Cooperative’ in the Agrarian History of India, c. 1900–1970,” Journal of Asian Studies 79, no. 1 (2020): 103–128. Other key studies that have traced the British-­ imperial connection to the cooperative movement include Johnston Birchall, The International Co-­operative Movement (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997), and Rita Rhodes, Empire and Co-­operation: How the British Empire Used Co-­operatives in its Development Strategies, 1900–1970 (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2012). 6.  As Frederick Cooper argues, to understand the political action of Africans during decolonization requires attention to how people selected and adapted “symbols or elements of European domination in calculated, instrumental ways or in acts of creative cultural bricolage.” Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 8–9. A growing

Notes    185 literature addresses the variety of political ideas, modernisms, and internationalisms generated from contexts of decolonizing Africa. See Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-­Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019); Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects; and Emma Hunter, Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania: Freedom, Democracy and Citizenship in the Era of Decolonization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). For a reflection on twentieth-­century political modernisms rooted in colonial experience and shaped by expectations of a postcolonial future but concerned with India rather than Africa, see Manu Goswami, “Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms,” American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (2012): 1461–1485. 7.  The melding of emergency rule with what British officials insisted was their long and deliberate process of preparing colonized subjects for democracy was a common feature of Britain’s end-­of-­empire conduct. Durba Ghosh has explored the phenomenon for 1920s–1940s India, charting how arguments for and enactments of liberal reform there were paradoxically wrapped up with the advance of emergency laws and measures, including the routine suspension of habeas corpus, by a British state aiming to combat anti-­ colonial movements. Officials insisted that the path toward self-­government required interim, illiberal emergency measures to safeguard the reform process. See Durba Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–1947 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Indeed, British colonial rulers, for all their claims of devotion to the rule of law, often relied on emergency powers and arguments for the necessity of exceptions to the law. See Nasser Hussain’s The Jurisprudence of Emergency, which contemplates the interaction of law and emergency in British colonial rule in India from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. Embedded within the colonizer’s rationale of rule and claims of sovereignty in India—which emphasized the bestowing of the rule of law and legal protections—there always was “a strong insistence on the needs of a regime of conquest . . . [and] the discretionary authority of the central executive” to determine when the emergency exception to law was needed to overcome real and perceived challenges to colonial rule. Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 4–5. And as Priya Satia puts the problem in regard to Britain’s construction of a new and brutal form of “covert empire” in the interwar Middle East, British “ ‘rule of law’ was in many ways a Trojan horse of codified and normalized exceptions that underwrote the coercions, corruptions, expropriations, and various forms of abasement that made the empire possible.” Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 10–11. 8.  I take my reading of the early history of the British cooperative movement from Peter Gurney, Co-­operative Culture and the Politics of Consumption in England, 1870–1930 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996). For his narrative of origins see especially 11–17. 9.  Owen published his ideas in several essays, the most significant being A New View of Society; or, Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character and the Application of the Principle to Practice (London: Richard and Arthur Taylor, 1813).

186     Notes 10.  Chartists themselves took to starting shops, growing out of their strategy to enforce “exclusive dealing” (essentially boycotting shopkeepers unless they supported the working-­ class movement). As Peter Gurney explains in his authoritative account of the culture and class politics of the British cooperative movement, when the Chartist uprisings were suppressed and their more confrontational strategy of a general strike failed, “an increasing amount of associational activity was channelled into ‘economic’ and ‘social’ solutions to inequality and oppression” such that “Chartist decline and co-­operative success were synchronous in many localities.” Gurney, Co-­operative Culture, 13–15. 11.  However, it would be wrong to call the cooperative movement an outgrowth or next phase of Chartism. George Holyoake, a key figure in the cooperative movement and early historian of the movement, was adamant that many Chartists opposed cooperation as framed by the Rochdale Society and that some of the Chartists who took part in the Rochdale movement faced accusations that in doing so they had betrayed the Chartist movement. See George Jacob Holyoake, The History of the Rochdale Pioneers, 10th ed. (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1917), 80. 12.  I take this list from Johnston Birchall’s account. For discussion of each of the Rochdale Principles, see Birchall, The International Co-­operative Movement, 7. 13. Gurney, Co-­operative Culture, 91–92. 14.  Nicole Robertson, The Co-­operative Movement and Communities in Britain, 1914– 1960: Minding Their Own Business (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 3. Robertson’s is the most significant study of the impact of the cooperative movement on the social, political, and cultural life of communities in Britain in the middle decades of the twentieth century. See also the collection of essays in Lawrence Black and Nicole Robertson, eds., Consumerism and the Co-­operative Movement in Modern British History: Taking Stock (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009), and Lawrence Black, Redefining British Politics: Culture, Consumerism and Participation, 1954–70 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), especially ch. 3, “Shopfloor Politics: Cooperative Culture and Affluence.” On the cooperative movement as a central part of the labor movement—in which cooperation combined identities of consumer and worker—see Matthew Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth-­ Century Britain: The Search for a Historical Movement (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 338. 15. Gurney, Co-­operative Culture; on the CWS and its functions and congresses see 19–20; on the later formation of the Party as the cooperative movement’s overt entrance into politics see 211. For a business history of the CWS that takes full stock of its imperial and international supply chains, see John F. Wilson, Anthony Webster, and Rachael Vorberg-­Rugh, Building Co-­operation: A Business History of The Co-­operative Group, 1863– 2013 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. 130–133. 16.  The Fabians Beatrice and Sidney Webb were convinced that state power was needed to install socialism, and they were mightily impressed during their trip to the Soviet Union in 1932 by the rapid socialist development the state was able to produce there. They wrote a lengthy book praising Soviet accomplishments. Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (London: Longmans, 1935). The Webbs’ admiration for the Soviet state’s great works was compatible, though, with the hopes Beatrice Webb especially put on consumer cooperation and the multitude of neighborhood democracies it initiated. The Webbs had started their earlier treatise, A Constitution for the Socialist

Notes    187 Commonwealth of Great Britain (London: Longmans, Green, 1920), with a chapter titled “Democracies of Consumers” that opened with discussion of the cooperative movement. They used “Socialist Commonwealth” and “Cooperative Commonwealth” interchangeably in the book. Gurney underscores how controversial the question of the state was among cooperators, especially before World War I, given that the franchise still excluded much of the working class. “Paternalistic” Fabians like the Webbs and Harry Snell, on the other hand, “openly embraced a neo-­Hegelian conception of the state as a benign motor of social progress.” Gurney, Co-­operative Culture, 181–182. 17.  For example, J. M. Winter called the Webbs’ view of non-­white people “socialist racialism,” which for the Webbs involved a conviction about the backwardness of most of the non-­white world and a belief that Europeans needed to be the agents of change to make socialism a reality. J. M. Winter, “The Webbs and the Non-­White World: A Case of Socialist Racialism,” Contemporary History 9, no. 1 (1974): 181–192. 18. Gurney, Co-­operative Culture, 45. 19.  As Corey Ross argues, while European colonizers were not the sole agents of environmental transformation in the colonial world (and in fact “the transformations of the colonial era commonly built on longer histories of escalating human intervention”), the heyday of European imperialism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was “a seminal period for the ecosystems of the colonial world” that on balance resulted in “considerable harm to the biophysical environment.” Corey Ross, Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire: Europe and the Transformation of the Tropical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 10–11. Particularly important in the British cooperative movement’s history of participating in the extraction of agricultural commodities in the British empire to satisfy consumer demand in Britain is tea. See Erika Rappaport’s important study of tea as a global commodity: its production and consumption, the meanings given to it in and beyond the British empire and colonial metropole, questions of labor, and more, including a thorough account of the imperial-­plantation side and colonial-­metropole’s consumer side of the co-­op’s engagement with tea. Erika Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 20.  Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 1–2. 21. Mantena, Alibis of Empire, 135–139. 22. Mantena, Alibis of Empire, 148–149. Mahmood Mamdani similarly attributes an important shift in rationalities and strategies of British rule to Maine, stressing how after 1857 indirect rule provided a new technology of rule that would secure order by managing difference. It was supposed to slow down social change while not halting it altogether. Mahmood Mamdani, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 24, 44–45. On indirect rule in India, see also Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 23.  As Hodge writes: “The most striking feature of British colonialism in the twentieth century is the growing confidence it placed in the use of science and expertise, joined with the new bureaucratic capacities of the state, to develop the natural and human resources of the empire and manage the perceived problems and disorder generated by colonial rule.” See Joseph Morgan Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development

188     Notes and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), 8. Cooper emphasizes that official panic in the 1930s and 1940s about labor activism, strikes, and “ ‘disturbances’ ” drove discussions in the Colonial Office such that officials came to see welfare as the “antidote to disorder.” See Cooper, “Modernizing Bureaucrats,” 67. 24.  The discourse about social reconstruction and “rural reconstruction” is vast and international. It is important to the story I tell, especially for interwar India and Africa. By pointing to the Owenite impulse to reconstruct society through cooperation, I am not suggesting that the broad international discourse around “reconstruction” is a direct descendant from Owen’s arguments. But government agents in India and Africa who picked up cooperatives were very much enthusiasts of the cooperative movement, well versed in its ideas tied back to Owenism, and dedicated to sticking to what they saw as tried-­and-­true cooperative principles drawn from British and European precedent. 25. Birchall, The International Co-­operative Movement, 13. 26.  Lord Hailey’s African Survey is a good benchmark for how development was talked about, in the interwar years at least, and he featured both British and French efforts at “Co-­ operative Organization.” See Lord Hailey, An African Survey: A Study of Problems Arising in Africa South of the Sahara (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 1660. 27.  Donna C. Mehos and Suzanne M. Moon, “The Uses of Portability: Circulating Experts in the Technopolitics of Cold War and Decolonization,” in Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, ed. Gabrielle Hecht (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). 28.  As Sunil Amrith writes of the remaking of the Bay of Bengal as a region, in the second half of the nineteenth century it was “governed by imperial laws that both uprooted and immobilized people, locking some communities in place (as ‘peasants’) while compelling others to travel under contracts of indenture or under the weight of debt. It was shaped, above all, by human labor—and human suffering.” Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 2. A large and growing body of scholarship has focused on the transformations of the Indian Ocean world, its interconnections and economic circuits, and the lives of people who moved through it during the era of European imperialism and colonial capitalism. In addition to Amrith’s book see Lynn Hollen Lees, Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects: British Malaya, 1786–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Thomas Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Sana Aiyar, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Nile Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Fahad Ahmad Bishara, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); and Isabel Hofmeyr, “Universalizing the Indian Ocean,” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 721–729. 29. Strickland, Co-­operation for Africa, 39. 30.  Moses E. Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 42–45. Rotating credit societies, such as the esusu

Notes    189 societies, were one way Igbo people and others in West Africa had long confronted the challenges of life within colonial capitalism through community-­pooled and community-­ distributed savings. These collected regular small contributions from members, then members took turns receiving large payouts from the rounds of collection on a rotating basis. Some of these community credit societies built up funds for small lending. For a study of them see Clifford Geertz, “The Rotating Credit Association: A ‘Middle Rung’ in Development,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 10, no. 3 (1962): 256–258. 31.  Cameron here is quoted from his words, as chair, introducing Strickland to a joint gathering of the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal African Society in 1934. It was at Strickland’s lecture that Cameron claimed to be “a student of Mr. Strickland’s writings for several years.” Claude Francis Strickland, “Supplement: The Co-­Operative Movement in Africa,” Journal of the Royal African Society 34, no. 134 (January 1935): 3. 32.  According to Li, “It is the paradox of community that makes it an exemplary site for governmental intervention: trustees do not direct or dominate, yet they always have work to do.” Li explores the concept in neoliberal World Bank community development programming in Indonesia. See Li, The Will to Improve, 232–233. Li builds on Rose’s arguments about government through community in Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 176 for Rose’s use of the concept of “government through community.” 33.  The adapted turn was greatly influenced by the theories of American educationists who held that African Americans in the US South needed an agriculturally focused, practical education with a social welfare aspect. Perhaps most influential was Thomas Jesse Jones. The Phelps-­Stokes philanthropy sponsored study tours of Africa that were instrumental in the embrace of principles of racial adaptation by the Colonial Office Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies by the mid-­1920s. Numerous studies have evaluated the history of education in British Africa and its intersection with development and welfare work, including the influence of ideas about adapted education in the 1920s–1950s. Key studies include Kenneth King, Pan-­Africanism and Education: A Study of Race Philanthropy and Education in the Southern States of America and East Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Carol Summers, Colonial Lessons: Africans’ Education in Southern Rhodesia, 1918– 1940 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002); John Anderson, The Struggle for the School: The Interaction of Missionary, Colonial Government and Nationalist Enterprise in the Development of Formal Education in Kenya (London: Longman, 1970); Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Joanna Lewis, Empire State-­Building: War and Welfare in Kenya, 1925–1952 (Oxford: James Currey, 2000); and Corrie Decker, Mobilizing Zanzibari Women: The Struggle for Respectability and Self-­Reliance in Colonial East Africa (New York: Palgrave, 2014). The British were not the only imperial power whose education system builders were in dialogue with ideas from the US southern context. See Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 34.  There is a literature on cooperatives in British Africa, including work that has sought an understanding of their entanglement in colonial rule. Some scholars have focused on them as part of class formation and colonial underdevelopment. Mahmood Mamdani considered the farmer cooperatives in post–World War II Uganda as vehicles of petty

190     Notes bourgeois politics. See Mahmood Mamdani, Politics and Class Formation in Uganda (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), 181–182. John Iliffe’s work on Tanzania read the British colonial government’s controls of African cooperatives as an aspect of colonial underdevelopment. See John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), esp. 274–281. An important work on the social and political history of cooperatives in two late-­colonial settings is Crawford Young, Neal P. Sherman, and Tim H. Rose, Cooperatives and Development: Agricultural Politics in Ghana and Uganda (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981). Thomas Spear’s study of Arusha and Meru farmers in Tanzania also includes significant discussion of African responses to state plans for cooperatives. See Thomas Spear, Mountain Farmers: Moral Economies of Land and Agricultural Development in Arusha and Meru (Oxford: James Currey, 1997), esp. 163–169. Andreas Eckert has examined the instrumental uses of cooperatives for government in late colonial and postcolonial Tanzania. See Andreas Eckert, “Useful Instruments of Participation? Local Government and Cooperatives in Tanzania, 1940s to 1970s,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 40, no. 1 (2007): 97–118. Zachernuk discusses cooperatives in the ideas of Nigerian intellectuals between the wars. See Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects, specifically the chapter entitled, “ ‘Unity, Self-­Help and Co-­operation’: Pragmatic Prescriptions, 1920–1940.” 35.  The importance of systems and planning has been emphasized in studies of colonial technopolitics, though this has typically been thought of in terms of machine technologies and related systems and their effects. Studies of colonial technopolitics include Gabrielle Hecht, ed., Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); and Timothy Mitchell, The Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-­politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 36.  Arturo Escobar’s study of development discourse emphasizes its post–World War II construction. See Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). For studies of development focused on the United States and the Cold War, see Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). John H. Perkins explores the strategic motivations of several states, including the United States and Britain, in his study of Cold War agricultural development science, and he emphasizes the role of the Rockefeller Foundation. See John H. Perkins, Geopolitics and the Green Revolution: Wheat, Genes, and the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). See Joseph Morgan Hodge’s two-­part essay that charts how historians of development have treated it in the last several decades. See especially part 2, in which he notes the importance of the shift to thinking about development before the Cold War and also moving the frame to a transnational one. Hodge, “Writing the History of Development (Part 1: The First Wave),” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 6, no. 3 (2015): 429–463; and Hodge, “Writing the History of Development (Part 2: Longer, Deeper, Wider),” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 7, no. 1 (2016): 125–174. 37. Immerwahr, Thinking Small; and Cullather, The Hungry World; see also David Nally and Stephen Taylor, “The Politics of Self-­Help: The Rockefeller Foundation, Philanthropy and the ‘Long’ Green Revolution,” Political Geography 49 (2015) 51–63.

Notes    191 38.  Before “capital-­D” Development was solidified as a global discourse in the mid-­ twentieth century, knowledge and practices that fit its general mold went by various names and were anchored to a variety of colonial contexts. For India, Benjamin Zachariah notes that there were several terms for essentially the same broad program in the 1920s and 1930s in India, including “village uplift, rural reconstruction, rural welfare, or rural development.” The work of government officials, missionaries, and Indian voluntary societies in experimenting with schemes of rural reconstruction across India was critical in the evolution of community development in its broad, twentieth-­century discourse. Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 113. 39.  On the importance of the constructed group in techniques of community development, see Li, The Will to Improve, 235. 40.  Here I follow Ritu Birla’s suggestion that to understand the formation of economic subjects—in her study, the “modern Indian capitalist” (or here, the modern African cooperator)—we need to focus on the productive work in the Foucauldian sense of colonial market regulatory law and grasp how it fit within specific political economies and how it aimed to reshape subjectivities and practices. But, Birla argues, such power effects also were partly the product of Indigenous people’s “negotiation, contestation, and appropriation of new technologies of rule.” Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 12. 41.  Jordanna Bailkin, for example, stresses “how Britons looked out rather than inward, and how decolonization shaped their daily lives and personal relationships.” Jordanna Bailkin, The Afterlife of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). Key titles in this broad project of excavating decolonization in Britain and interconnections between the colonial metropole and British colonies, former colonies, and the Commonwealth include Bill Schwarz, The White Man’s World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Stuart Ward, ed., British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001); and Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire: 1939–1965 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). On questions especially related to the Commonwealth, see Radhika Natarajan, “Performing Multiculturalism: The Commonwealth Arts Festival of 1965,” Journal of British Studies 53, no. 3 (2014): 705–733; see also Joel Hebert, “The Sun Never Sets: Rethinking the Politics of Late British Decolonization, 1968 to the Present” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 2019). Significant recent studies have centered on postwar questions of race and migration, articulated in immigration law and in contested meanings of Britishness. See Kennetta Hammond Perry’s study focused on Black politics and civil rights activism, London Is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship, and the Politics of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); a less recent but important study of late colonial migration and postwar citizenship law is Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). Others have usefully drawn attention to connections to earlier, interwar and early postwar questions of race and politics in Britain, including anti-­colonial politics. See Susan Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); and Carina Ray’s work, especially Crossing the Color Line: Race,

192     Notes Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015) and “Interracial Intimacies and the Gendered Optics of African Nationalism in the Colonial Metropole,” Journal of West African History 5, no. 2 (2019): 57–84. 42.  There is a growing literature on the politics and political culture of the consumer cooperative movement in Britain in the twentieth century. Key studies include Gurney, Co-­ operative Culture; Robertson, The Co-­operative Movement; and Alan Burton, The British Consumer Co-­operative Movement and Film, 1890s–1960s (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2005). Several essays explore twentieth-­century questions in Black and Robertson, Consumerism and the Co-­operative Movement. A valuable recent study of the CWS from a business history angle that attends as well to political considerations that confronted the group is Wilson, Webster, and Vorberg-­Rugh, Building Co-­operation. 43.  The idea that the cooperative movement—alongside the trade union movement— was foundational to British industrial democracy was orthodoxy on the left in twentieth-­ century Britain. In her 1891 study of the cooperative movement, Beatrice Webb argued that the iconic shop started by the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers—and importantly their system of dividing profits among customers, “i.e., by the community at large,” meant that the cooperative movement was established “on the firm foundation of pure democracy.” In order for Britain to have a “fully developed democracy,” she wrote, “the nation at large must possess those moral characteristics which have enabled Co-­operators to introduce democratic self-­government into a certain portion of the industry, commerce and finance of the nation.” See Beatrice Webb, The Co-­Operative Movement in Great Britain (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1891), 63, 239–240. 44.  Apartheid South Africa, as Ryan Irwin argues, was a “foil” to the vision of post­ colonial order set forth at the 1955 Bandung (Java, Indonesia) conference of African and Asian diplomats and activists. Representatives at the conference wanted “to destroy the epistemology of colonialism and erect in its place an intellectual edifice that treated territorial independence, economic development, and racial equality as universal rights.” Ryan Irwin, Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3–5. C HA P T E R 1 . C O O P E R AT I V E RU L E

1.  C. F. Strickland, “Supplement: The Co-­Operative Movement in Africa,” Journal of the Royal African Society 34, no. 134 (January 1935): 4–6. 2.  Bronislaw Malinowski was the standout figure in pushing the practical turn to connect fieldwork to indirect rule and village uplift and education. A student of his, Lucy Mair, was an important Colonial Office adviser as well. The historiography that traces the intersection of empire and anthropology is vast. A very good study of the intellectual history of British anthropology that covers this turn is George Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1998). 3.  The chair of the meeting, Sir Donald Cameron, governor of Nigeria and former governor of Tanganyika, introduced Strickland as the “apostle” of the “system of cooperative effort.” He emphasized that the audience had to think of it as a system so as not to confuse it with the image most people would have of “the great trading and co-­operative enterprises that were undertaken in Europe.” Strickland, “Supplement,” 3.

Notes    193 4.  C. F. Strickland, “The Cooperative Movement in the East,” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1931–1939) 11, no. 6 (1932): 813. 5.  In his report to the government of Palestine he quoted the whole section on the Registrar and his job description from Linlithgow’s Report of the Royal Commission on Agriculture in India (1928). Cited in Government of Palestine, Report by Mr. C. F. Strickland of the Indian Civil Service on the Possibility of Introducing a System of Agricultural Co-­operation in Palestine (Jerusalem: Printing and Stationary Office, 1930), 11. 6.  UK TNA CO 323/1151/6, “Report on Co-­operation and the Economic Condition of the Agriculturists in Zanzibar,” 1931, ch. III, para. 9. 7.  C. F. Strickland, Co-­operation for Africa (London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1933), 2. 8.  C. F. Strickland, “Co-­operation for Africa,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 6, no. 1 (1933): 15. 9.  Like most of his ICS peers throughout India, Strickland had a privileged upbringing, the kind that set one up for imperial service. He attended public school at Winchester before going to Oxford. The Punjab ICS was the elite of the elite. As Clive Dewey writes, the Punjab Civil Servants “saw themselves, and were seen by others, as a corps d’elite.” The Punjab School had a reputation as “a training-­ground for brilliant administrators.” So ­valued was a Punjab appointment that “the India Office had to introduce rules stopping the candidates who got the highest marks in the ICS examination opting for the Punjab, to give unpopular provinces a share of the ablest recruits.” Clive Dewey, Anglo-­Indian Attitudes: The Mind of the India Civil Service (London: Bloomsbury, 1993), 201. 10.  An important example of recent scholarship that has centered the interwar history of science and social science in colonial contexts is Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 11.  It bears noting that while the Punjab ICS was a great exemplar of the pairing of science, and especially social science, with colonial rule, the more general drift to science was part of a much wider pattern throughout India in the late nineteenth century, in and beyond the colonial state. As Prakash Kumar observes in his study of indigo development in India, in the late nineteenth century the “indigo science” deployed by European planters “developed a nexus with the effort by the colonial state to create a science of agricultural development” that “unfolded at the level of formation of institutions.” Prakash Kumar, Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 178. 12.  Dewey’s study of the intellectual milieu of the ICS focuses on two members of the Punjab ICS concerned with such village uplift work, F. L. Brayne and former Cooperative Registrar Malcolm Darling (including, significantly for both men, organizing cooperatives). Dewey, Anglo-­Indian Attitudes. For discussion of “rural reconstruction” ideas that places Brayne and other ICS practitioners of village improvement schemes in a transnational frame of development theory and practice in which “the village” emerged as an important category of development knowledge, see Nicole Sackley, “The Village as Cold War Site: Experts, Development, and the History of Rural Reconstruction,” Journal of Global History 6, no. 3 (2011): 481–504. 13.  For a chronicle of some of the multitude of rural political movements in India, many centered in Punjab, see Mridula Mukherjee, Peasants in India’s Non-­violent Revolution: Practice and Theory (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2004).

194     Notes 14.  Thomas R. Metcalf, “The British and the Moneylender in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Modern History 34, no. 4 (December 1962): 390–97. 15.  According to I. J. Catanach, the 1904 Indian Cooperative Societies Act came out of years of official discussions that were initially spurred by the “so-­called Deccan Riots of 1875” in Bombay Presidency, which officials saw as the boiling-­over of peasant anger over loss of land to “money-­lenders-­cum-­traders.” Catanach, Rural Credit in Western India, 1875–1930: Rural Credit and the Co-­operative Movement in the Bombay Presidency (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 1. 16.  For discussion of the military importance of Punjab, see Ian Talbot, Punjab and the Raj, 1849–1947 (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1988), 41. 17. That there was a reverent mood toward the Punjab peasant was perhaps best expressed by another former Punjab Cooperatives registrar, Malcolm Darling. See his influential study of the Punjab peasantry, The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt (London: Oxford University Press, 1925). Darling was one of the subjects of Clive Dewey’s intellectual history of the ICS. See Dewey, Anglo-­Indian Attitudes. 18.  Neeti Nair, Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 13. 19.  Kenneth Jones, Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in 19th-­Century Punjab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 182–183. 20. Mukherjee, Peasants in India’s Non-­Violent Revolution, 63–65. 21. Darling, The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt, 261. 22.  Patrick Joyce, The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State Since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 146–147. 23. C. F. Strickland, “Report on Co-­operation in Malaya [for the Federated Malay States],” 1929, c395–c396. Copy consulted in UK TNA CO 323/1151/6. 24.  Government of Palestine, Report by Mr. C. F. Strickland, 12. 25.  IOR V/24/596, “Report on the Working of the Co-­operative Societies in the Punjab for the Year Ending 31st July 1921,” p. 19. 26.  Strickland, “Report on Co-­operation in Malaya,” c394. 27. Strickland, Co-­operation for Africa, 39. 28. Strickland, Co-­operation for Africa, 4–5. 29.  On character and other moral discourses to liberal governmentality see Lauren Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 30.  As far back as the days of East India Company rule, the British searched for systems that could improve the character of British agents. Eddy Kent, Corporate Character: Representing Imperial Power in British India, 1786–1901 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014). 31.  John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation (London: John W. Parker, 1843), 2: 522–523. 32.  IOR V/24/595, Annual Report on the Working of Co-­operative Societies in the Punjab, for the 15 Months Ending 30th June, 1907 (Lahore: Government Printers, 1907), 13. 33.  UK TNA CO 323/1151/6, Claude Strickland, “Report on Co-­operation and the Economic Condition of the Agriculturists in Zanzibar,” 1931, ch. 3, para. 20.

Notes    195 34.  IOR V/24/596, [Punjab] Cooperatives Department Report, 1919–1920, p. 21. 35.  IOR V/24/595, Annual Report on the Working of Co-­operative Societies in the Punjab, 1907. 36.  IOR V/24/596, Annual Report on the Working of Co-­operative Societies in the Punjab, 1919–1920, p. 4. 37. Strickland, Co-­operation for Africa, 6–7. 38.  C. F. Strickland, “The Co-­operative Society as an Instrument of Economic and Social Construction,” Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics 8, no. 1 (January 1942): 102. 39.  RH Mss. Ind. Ocn. s178, Sir Leonard Gammans [Assistant Director of Co-­operation, FMS & SS], “Urban Co-­operation in Malaya,” 1932. Gammans quoted as support for his view not Strickland but another published former Punjab Registrar, Hugh Calvert, who argued, “ ‘Co-­operation seeks to make the best of the existing economic systems by removing the more glaring evils of capitalism.’ ” Gammans did not identify the source of his quotation from Calvert. 40.  For a study of the long colonial history of the development of plantation colonialism in Malaya that looks closely at the growth of capitalist industry there (focused on sugar plantations in the nineteenth century and rubber plantations in the twentieth century), the labor recruitment and often brutal labor-­disciplinary regimes that fueled it, and the hybrid identities (and multiple sovereignties) created out of its history, see Lynn Hollen Lees, Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects: British Malaya, 1786–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). For a study of labor migration to Malaya that uses a wider frame to consider migration throughout the Bay of Bengal, see Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 41. Dewey, Anglo-­Indian Attitudes, 77–80. See pp. 61–62 for discussion of Brayne’s enduring influence in India, where his rural reconstruction work was seen by experts in the 1950s and 1960s as pioneering in the national community development movement. 42.  UK TNA CO 323/1151/6, Strickland, “Report on Co-­operation in Malaya,” c407. 43. Lees, Planting Empire, 171–173, 185–186. 44. Lees, Planting Empire, 210–215. 45.  UK TNA CO 323/1151/6, Strickland, “Report on Co-­operation in Malaya,” c392–394. 46.  UK TNA CO 323/1151/6, Strickland, “Report on Co-­operation in Malaya,” c390-­391. 47.  UK TNA CO 323/1151/6, Strickland, “Report on Co-­operation in Malaya,” c392. 48.  UK TNA CO 323/1151/6, Strickland, “Report on Co-­operation in Malaya,” c407. 49.  UK TNA CO 323/1151/6, Strickland, “Report on Co-­operation in Malaya,” c399. 50.  UK TNA CO 323/1151/6, Strickland, “Report on Co-­operation in Malaya,” c394-­396. 51.  UK TNA CO 323/1151/6, “Summary of the Reports Made by Mr. C.F. Strickland in Regard to Co-­operation and Economic Conditions in Palestine, Malaya and Zanzibar,” 1931. 52.  Nadine Chan, “Making Ahmad ‘Problem Conscious’: Educational Film and the Rural Lecture Caravan in 1930s British Malaya,” Cinema Journal 55, no. 4 (Summer 2016): 96. Chan describes the narrative structure of Thrift and Extravagance (1929) as “a comparison between the ‘good’ Malay and the ‘bad’ Malay.” It contrasts the lives of two Malay former school friends: one grows up thrifty and saves his money in the cooperative bank; the other is extravagant and lazy and ends up mortgaging his rubber tree plot to an Indian moneylender.

196     Notes 53.  For official discussion of the formation of the District Economic Boards and the role of the Cooperative Societies Department, see RH Mss. Ind. Ocn. s178, Minutes of the Conference of Officers of the Cooperative Societies Department Held at Kuala Lumpur on the 24th and 25th April, 1933. 54. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal, 168–170. 55.  RH Mss. Ind. Ocn. s178, Memorandum on Economic Development. This is unsigned but is included in the papers of Sir Leonard Gammans [Assistant Director of Co-­operation, Malaya South]. 56.  On British analogizing between Arabs and Africans versus Jews and white settlers, see Penny Sinanoglou, Partitioning Palestine: British Policy Making at the End of Empire (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2019), 23. On the British belief that Jews would advance development and be a civilizing force, see Jacob Norris, Land of Progress: Palestine in the Age of Colonial Development, 1905–1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 65–67. 57. Sinanoglou, Partitioning Palestine, 2–3. 58. Sinanoglou, Partitioning Palestine, 22–26. 59.  Charles Anderson, “The British Mandate and the Crisis of Palestinian Landlessness, 1929–1936, Middle Eastern Studies 54, no. 2 (2018): 173. 60.  Anderson, “The British Mandate,” 176. Anderson quotes the Shaw Commission report on the 1929 “disturbances,” which was the first (published in 1930). 61.  I rely on Anderson’s parsing and analysis of these debates, which were fueled by investigations and reports. 62.  Claude Francis Strickland, “The Struggle for Land in Palestine,” Current History 34, no. 1 (April 1, 1931): 45–46. 63.  Strickland, “The Struggle for Land in Palestine,” 48–49. 64. Cooperatives of various types were widely used by Jews in Mandatory Palestine, including, as Nahum Karlinsky has documented, credit cooperatives. See Nahum Karlinsky, “Jewish Philanthropy and Jewish Credit Cooperatives in Eastern Europe and Palestine up to 1939: A Transnational Phenomenon?,” Journal of Israeli History 27, no. 2 (2008): 163–164. 65. UK TNA CO 733/164/4, J. R. Chancellor to Mr. Shuckburgh [Colonial Office], June 7, 1929. 66.  Government of Palestine, Report by Mr. C. F. Strickland, 55. 67.  UK TNA CO 323/1151/6, “Summary of the Reports Made by Mr. C. F. Strickland in Regard to Co-­operation and Economic Conditions.” 68.  Amos Nadan, The Palestinian Peasant Economy under the Mandate: A Story of Colonial Bungling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 221–228. 69.  Strickland, “The Struggle for Land in Palestine,” 45–49. 70.  Philip Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (Charlotteseville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 116. 71.  A good example is the compulsory marketing regime in 1930s Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), which sought to rescue settler maize farmers, some of whom were organized in cooperatives, from the ravages of the Depression by forcing Tonga maize farmers to sell through state boards. See Kenneth P. Vickery, “Saving Settlers: Maize Control in Northern Rhodesia,” Journal of Southern African Studies 11, no. 2 (April 1985): 212–234. 72.  Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 13.

Notes    197 73. Pedersen, The Guardians, 4. 74.  The language is from Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, describing the new code for powers in League Mandatory territories formerly governed by the German and Ottoman empires. 75.  Hailey dedicated an entire chapter to surveying the state of cooperation, for both Europeans and Africans. See chapter 22, “Co-­operative Organization,” in Lord Hailey, An African Survey: A Study of Problems Arising in Africa South of the Sahara (London: Oxford, 1938), 1466–1483. 76.  Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 21. 77. Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters, 5. 78.  Jonathon Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 42–44. 79.  Michael Lofchie, Zanzibar: Background to Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 104–113. 80.  ZNA AB 4/9, Director of Agriculture’s Memorandum on Co-­operation in Zanzibar, February 15, 1930. 81.  I have not seen it, but apparently Kirkham authored a report on the Madagascar clove industry in 1928. It is mentioned in a note by Zanzibar’s consulting silviculturist, R. S. Troup, requesting the report for reading in advance of his own study of Zanzibar’s clove trees. UK TNA CO 618/49/9, Troup to Acheson [Colonial Office], June 22, 1931. 82. Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones, 44. 83.  UK TNA CO 323/1151/6, Strickland, “Report on Co-­operation and the Economic Condition of the Agriculturists in Zanzibar,” ch. 4, para. 1. 84.  The chief secretary first reached out to London’s cooperative movement–focused Horace Plunkett Foundation before Sidney Webb’s Colonial Office jumped in with the idea to send Strickland, who had recently returned to Britain from Palestine. See ZNA AB 4/9, Extract from the British Resident’s Despatch No. 145 of June 11, 1930, to the Secretary of State for the Colonies. 85.  UK TNA CO 323/1151/6, Strickland, “Report on Co-­operation and the Economic Condition of the Agriculturists in Zanzibar,” ch. 1, paras. 2–4. 86. Mandana Limbert, “Caste, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Arabness in Southern Arabia,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 34, no. 3 (2014): 593–594. 87.  UK TNA CO 323/1151/6, Strickland, “Report on Co-­operation and the Economic Condition of the Agriculturists in Zanzibar,” ch. 1, paras. 10–12. 88.  Strickland, “Report on Co-­operation and the Economic Condition of the Agriculturists in Zanzibar,” ch. 4, paras. 2–3. 89.  UK TNA CO 618/49/9, Sir John Campbell’s minute, July 31, 1931. 90.  UK TNA CO 618/49/9, Note of a Discussion at the Colonial Office on the 25th September, 1931. Present at the meeting were Rankine, Strickland, Sir C. Bottomley, Sir J. Campbell, F. A. Stockdale, A. B. Acheson, and B. C. Johnstone. 91.  Ed Ferguson, “The Formation of a Colonial Economy, 1915–1945,” in Zanzibar under Colonial Rule, ed. Abdul Sheriff and Ed Ferguson (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991), 69.

198     Notes 92.  UK TNA CO 618/49/9, Strickland to H. T. Allen, October 8, 1931. 93.  UK TNA CO 323/1151/6, Strickland, “Report on Co-­operation and the Economic Condition of the Agriculturists in Zanzibar,” ch. 3, para. 4. An example of the trouble of weak statistical knowledge can be found in the chief secretary’s difficulties in collecting figures on Arab indebtedness in advance of Strickland’s visit. The chief secretary and the provincial commissioners of Zanzibar and Pemba seem to have worked out a partial solution to the dearth of numbers by selecting “typical cases” of indebted owners, conducting interviews with them, and then extrapolating economic lessons. ZNA AB 4/9, Chief Secretary’s minute, December 12, 1930. 94.  UK TNA CO 618/49/9, Strickland to Mr. Allen, Colonial Office, October 8, 1931. Strickland recommended the new Zanzibar Registrar go first to Ceylon, and he suggested several short visits to other provinces of India (Madras, Bombay, the United Provinces). He recommended a full month’s stay in Punjab. 95.  This lopsided expenditure was not out of place in Zanzibar, where the greatest allocation in the annual budget was for the salaries and pensions of state officials “from the Sultan, through European officials to lesser functionaries at the provincial and local level.” Ferguson, “The Formation of the Colonial Economy,” 64. Even so, Strickland also thought the pay for the registrar anywhere needed to be high enough to attract the best candidate in colonial service. 96.  UK TNA CO 618/58/5, J. S. Last [Cooperative Registrar], “Report on Government Liability in Connexion with the Introduction and Control of Co-­operation,” August 15, 1933. 97.  UK TNA CO 618/58/5, Cunliffe-­Lister to Rankine, October 11, 1934. The letter discusses the hearing and Cunliffe-­Lister’s decision to exonerate Last as well as his recommendation to close the Cooperative Department and abolish the position of Registrar. 98.  A small library was assembled by the Zanzibar Cooperative Department following Strickland’s visit, presumably by Last. The library was taken over by the Clove Growers Association when the department closed in 1934 and then sent back to the Cooperative Department when it was restarted after World War II, to be used as training material for staff. A list of the library’s eighty-­six volumes in 1952 included nine titles on Punjab and two other books authored by Strickland (on cooperation in India and Europe, respectively) as well as the catalog of the library of the Punjab Registrar of Cooperative Societies. See ZNA AP16/12, “List of Books Loaned to Registrar of Cooperative Societies by the Clove Growers Association, July 1952.” The Zanzibar government had requested Strickland’s input, and he gave them a short list of twelve titles, including his own key publications. Strickland’s list is an enclosure to UK TNA CO 618/49/9, Strickland to Mr. Allen, October 8, 1931. 99.  The Tanganyika trip took place before his study of Zanzibar, but it was during the same East Africa tour. 100. Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones, 40. 101. Strickland, Co-­operation for Africa, 9. 102. Strickland, Co-­operation for Africa, 38. 103.  Emma Hunter, Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania: Freedom, Democracy and Citizenship in the Era of Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 90–91. 104. Hunter, Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania, 43–46.

Notes    199 105. Steven Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1990), 143–144. As Feierman notes in the context of Shambaai, not everyone welcomed this connection to the mission school. Many Muslims wanted maendeleo but did not want their children witnessed to or discriminated against by mission teachers. 106.  John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 273–274. 107. Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, 281–282. 108.  Thomas Spear, Mountain Farmers: Moral Economies of Land and Agricultural Development in Arusha and Meru (Oxford: James Currey, 1997), 163–165. 109. Spear, Mountain Farmers, 168–169. 110. Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, 276–277. My discussion of the KNPA mostly follows Susan G. Rogers, “The Kilimanjaro Native Planters Association: Administrative Responses to Chagga Initiatives in the 1920s,” Transafrican Journal of History 4, no. 1/2 (1974): 94–114. Rogers’s study was based in part on interviews with former members of the KNPA. 111.  Rogers, “The Kilimanjaro Native Planters Association,” 98. 112.  Rogers, “The Kilimanjaro Native Planters Association,” 96; and Sally Falk Moore, Social Facts and Fabrications: “Customary” Law on Kilimanjaro, 1880–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 122. 113.  Rogers, “The Kilimanjaro Native Planters Association,” 99–103. 114.  The district officer, A. L. Pennington, is quoted in Rogers, “The Kilimanjaro Native Planters Association,” 101–102. 115. Moore, Social Facts and Fabrications, 124. Merinyo received a six-­month prison sentence. According to Moore, who interviewed Merinyo in 1969, the former KNPA leader believed “he had been persecuted for political activity and ‘uppityness.’ ” 116.  UK TNA CO 691/118/10, Draft of a Cooperative Societies Ordinance for Tanganyika, 1931. 117.  While the Cooperative Societies Ordinance 1932 reserved powers to the Registrar to have the final word on “whether any person belongs to any particular tribe, class, or occupation,” these provisions had little meaning since there were no specific privileges, duties, or encumbrances that were stated as applying only to tribes or agriculturists. 118. Strickland, Co-­operation for Africa, 54–55. 119.  UK TNA CO 691/118/10, F.A. Stockdale’s minute, July 10, 1931. 120.  Rogers, “The Kilimanjaro Native Planters Association,” 110. 121.  UK TNA CO 691/159/9, Speech made by the Acting Governor to the Chagga Tribe at a meeting held in the Chagga Council House on July 30, 1937. 122.  Grants and loans to build and run the station were available thanks to the recent Colonial Development Act (1929); the loans were repaid by a tax on all exported coffee. Details about the station are described in S. M. Gilbert, The Objects and Scope of the Coffee Research and Experimental Station, Tanganyika Territory Department of Agriculture Pamphlet no. 15 (Dar es Salaam: Government Printers, 1935). Gilbert was the chief scientific officer at the station. The copy of the pamphlet consulted is in UK TNA CO 691/135/12. 123. Moore, Social Facts and Fabrications, 124–125.

200     Notes 124.  Rogers, “The Kilimanjaro Native Planters Association,” 109. 125. Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, 279–280. 126.  UK TNA CO 691/168/4, Memorandum Re: Possibility of Settling the Wachagga Cases and the Whole Dispute between the Wachagga, the Kilimanjaro Native Co-­operative Union, Ltd., and Government, July 16, 1938 [by Atkinson, Brown, Morrison and Ainslie, Advocates, Dar es Salaam]. 127. LON R4087 6A/34044/722, Report by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of the Tanganyika Territory for the Year 1937, 208. 128.  UK TNA CO 691/168/4, Sir H.G. Bushe’s minute, March 10, 1939. 129.  UK TNA CO 691/168/4, Sir H.G. Bushe’s minute, June 3, 1939. 130. UK TNA CO 691/168/4, Commentary on the memorial of Messrs. Atknison, Brown, Morrison, and Ainslie, 1938. 131.  UK TNA CO 691/168/4, Memorandum Re: Possibility of Settling the Wachagga Cases and the Whole Dispute between the Wachagga, the Kilimanjaro Native Co-­operative Union, Ltd., and Government, July 16, 1938 [by Atkinson, Brown, Morrison and Ainslie, Advocates, Dar es Salaam]. 132.  UK TNA CO 691/159/9, Acting Governor D. W. Kennedy to Sec. of State Ormsby-­ Gore, September 27, 1937. 133. Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, 279–280. 134.  The account I summarize here was the official account supplied to the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission. LON R4087 6A/34044/722, Report by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of the Tanganyika Territory for the Year 1937, 211–212. 135.  Report by His Majesty’s Government to the Council of the League of Nations , 212. To put this aerial strategy in context, between the wars and during the post–World War II era of end-­of-­empire counterinsurgency, the British often turned to air power to exert control over colonies. In some cases—notably in Iraq, Sudan, and British Somaliland—the planes actually did attack. Key works in the historiography on air control in the British empire include David E. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force, 1919–1939 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990); David Killingray, “ ‘A Swift Agent of Government’: Air Power in British Colonial Africa, 1916–1939,” Journal of African History 25, no. 4 (1984): 429–444; and Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), particularly the chapter “Air Control.” 136.  Officials in the Colonial Office circulated press clippings and the BBC news bulletins about the protests and discussed how to promote the official version of events. These are archived in UK TNA CO 691/159/10. Item 14 is the initial Daily Mail report, “Bombers Warn Natives,” September 20, 1937. 137.  A translation of the Il Tevere article was sent to the Foreign Office. See UK TNA CO 691/159/10, item 27, Chancery, British Embassy, Rome to Southern Department, Foreign Office, October 1, 1937. 138.  An example is the headline that stretched across an entire page of the Evening News more than a week after the protests: “Tokio Press Accuses Britain of ‘Air Massacres in

Notes    201 Africa,’ ” Evening News, September 28, 1937. Press clipping found in UK TNA CO 691/159/10, item 15. 139.  The conversation between the filmmaker Kingston-­Davies and Mr. Seel [Colonial Office] is detailed in Mr. Seel’s minute of October 16, 1937, in UK TNA CO 691/159/10. Kingston-­Davies had already produced an educational film the year before the disturbances that was shot near Moshi and depicted coffee farming and cooperative marketing on the mountain: Shamba Ya Kahava: African Coffee Production near Moshi, Tanganyika (Kingston-­Davies, dir., 1936). For a synopsis see the film’s entry in Monthly Film Bulletin 4, no. 37 (January 1937): 231–232. 140.  UK TNA CO 691/159/9, Mr. Lee’s minute, November 1, 1937. 141.  LON R5087, 6A/34044/722, Report by His Majesty’s Government to the Council of the League of Nations. The quote is from p. 11 of the report. 142.  LON R5087, 6A/34044/722, Permanent Mandates Commission Thirty-­Fourth Session, Tanganyika Territory, Observations, 1938. As the commission concluded, it was “to the credit of the operation of the system of indirect rule practiced in the territory, that, as appears from the annual report, the native authorities took action on their own motion for the restoration of order on the occasion of the disturbances which occurred in the district of Moshi and that this result was achieved without it being necessary for the administration to resort to force.” 143. Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, 279. 144.  Fabian Colonial Bureau, Co-­operation in the Colonies: A Report from a Special Committee to the Fabian Colonial Bureau (London: Allen & Unwin, 1945), 79–81. The focus on the “young Chagga” is interesting here, and it is useful to think about the anxiety it betrays—with its concern for the “orderly” display of the younger generation’s energies—within a wider frame of British rule in Africa. As Paul Ocobock argues for colonial Kenya, British officials, missionaries, and others often were concerned in a special way with policing, disciplining, and otherwise controlling young men. Officials in what Ocobock calls the “elder state” intervened in age relations as an important technique of rule, and as colonialism wore on the British increasingly saw young men as a special category of threat to colonial rule. By the 1950s, when the colonial state and settler power were most precarious and battling against Mau Mau fighters, the British “constructed a network of institutions to instill a subordinate, subservient masculinity and maturity in captured young rebels.” Paul Ocobock, An Uncertain Age: The Politics of Manhood in Kenya (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017), 4–5. 145.  UK TNA CO 691/168/4, Commentary on the Memorandum from Messrs. Atkinson, Brown, Morrison, and Ainslie, July 16, 1938. It is not clear how the Fabian researchers found the description—perhaps through the Colonial Office—but it is nearly word-­for-­ word identical: “To attend some of the meetings of the primary societies is illuminating. They are conducted on the basis of free speech, delivered with proper decorum, and enable the peasant to express himself on the subjects which are so close to his welfare, such as crops and prices and the proper use of his land.” 146.  UK TNA CO 536/195/4, Confidential Memorandum on the Cooperative Societies Bill [by a special committee appointed by the Uganda Governor to consider the Bill], June 25, 1937. 147. The Kenya Farmer’s Association Limited and the Coffee Growers Association Limited were two limited liability associations referenced in the official deliberations about

202     Notes the Kenya cooperative law of 1931. See UK TNA CO 533/415/10, A.D.A. MacGregor’s Comments on Colonial Office minutes on the Kenya Cooperative Societies Ordinance, 1931. Dated March 15, 1932. 148.  UK TNA CO 533/415/10, Stockdale’s minute, December 30, 1931. 149.  UK TNA CO 533/415/10, Freeston’s minute, January 14, 1932. 150.  UK TNA CO 533/415/10, Draft of S. of S. letter to Kenya Governor, June 22, 1932. See p. 3 of the letter. The caution that African small-­producer cooperatives should not be registered under the 1931 Kenya law came from Cunliffe-­Lister but was shaped by the Colonial Office’s staff of rural development experts, especially Stockdale. See Mr. Freeston’s minute in the same file, dated January 14, 1932, with the suggestion to send the Kenya governor “a confidential despatch saying that the S. of S. is advised that the Ordinance is wholly unsuitable for co-­operative societies in the Native Reserves . . . and that registration of native societies under it should not be allowed pending a further communication from the S. of S.” 151.  UK TNA CO 555/499/5, Governor of Kenya to Secretary of State, November 28, 1938; see also in the same file Mr. White’s minute, February 20, 1939. 152.  UK TNA CO 533/415/10, Draft of S. of S. letter to Kenya Governor, June 22, 1932. 153.  Alongside Palestine and the problem of Arab land alienation, Kenya was the most vexing issue for Webb. For an excellent study of this moment of debate in the Colonial Office and the Labour Party, see Robert Gregory, Sidney Webb and East Africa: Labour’s Experiment with the Doctrine of Native Paramountcy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962). 154.  Recalling his conversation with Webb wherein Webb promised more cooperation for the colonies, Strickland wrote that “there was only time, however, for him to issue a memorandum to colonial governments on the subject during his tenure of office as Colonial Secretary, and little, if any, action resulted.” Fabian Colonial Bureau, Co-­operation in the Colonies. 155.  Strickland, “The Cooperative Movement in the East,” 813. 156.  On the Nigerian government’s search for inexpensive welfare solutions and Cameron’s attitudes about the character flaws at the root of economic hardship facing rural Nigerians, see Moses E. Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 43. According to Ochonu, Cameron wanted to leverage the existing Indigenous forms of mutual benefit and savings societies in addition to importing, via British cooperative experts, the “thrift and repression of extravagance” societies familiar from government cooperative extension in India (of which, as noted already, Strickland often sang the praises) and existing in other places like Java and Japan. 157.  CCNY 186/14, “Progress Report on Co-­operation in Nigeria,” March, 1936. 158.  UK TNA CO 323/1151/6, C.F. Strickland, “Report on Co-­operation in Malaya,” c395. 159.  Strickland, “Supplement,” 8. 160.  Claude Francis Strickland, “Co-­operation and the Schoolmaster,” Oversea Education: A Journal of Educational Experiment and Research in Tropical and Subtropical Areas, 1, no. 4 (July 1930): 122. C HA P T E R 2 . P E DAG O G I E S O F C OM M U N I T Y D EV E L O P M E N T

1.  As a League Mandate territory, Tanganyika Territory technically fell outside the remit of the corporation’s British mission, but Oldham urged Keppel to see the experimental

Notes    203 value of the trust territory and the value of the study for providing insights applicable to “the whole of Africa.” CCNY 281/1, J. H. Oldham to F. P. Keppel, October 10, 1933. 2.  CCNY 281/1, J. H. Oldham to F. P. Keppel, October 10, 1933. 3.  CCNY 281/1, F. P. Keppel to J. H. Oldham, November 3, 1933. 4.  CCNY 188A/5, J. H. Oldham to F. P. Keppel, April 30, 1925. For a largely historiographical overview of interwar “adapted education” that situates Oldham, Phelps-­Stokesim, and missionary community development (such as the Jeanes schools) as part of that interwar shift, see Aaron Windel, “British Colonial Education in Africa: Policy and Practice in the Era of Trusteeship,” History Compass 7, no. 1 (2009): 1–21. 5.  As Helen Tilley details the origins of what would become Hailey’s survey, the major lobbying of Keppel to commit Carnegie funds to the project took place at a luncheon organized by Oldham in 1931 at Chatham House in London. See Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 98–99. 6.  Peter Kallaway, “Education, Health and Social Welfare in the Late Colonial Context: The International Missionary Council and Educational Transition in the Interwar Years with Specific Reference to Colonial Africa,” History of Education 38, no. 2 (2009): 222–223. See p. 225 for discussion of the social gospel focus of missions, whereas earlier evangelism was mainly thought of as “the ‘conversion’ of individuals and the overcoming of all other religions.” 7.  Kallaway, “Education, Health and Social Welfare,” 226–228. 8.  The problem of missionary education received its own report and Africa its own chapter within it. See World Missionary Conference, Report of Commission III: Education in Relation to the Christianisation of National Life (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson, and Ferrier, 1910). 9.  World Missionary Conference, Report of Commission III, 213. 10.  Adrian Hastings, “The Clash of Nationalism and Universalism within Twentieth-­ Century Missionary Christianity,” in Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire, ed. Brian Stanley and Alaine Low (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2003), 21. 11.  Hastings, “The Clash of Nationalism and Universalism,” 21–22. 12.  Butterfield had been a member of Theodore Roosevelt’s 1908 Country Life Commission, tasked with analyzing deficiencies in American rural life and recommending solutions. See Scott J. Peters and Paul A. Morgan, “The Country Life Commission: Reconsidering a Milestone in American Agricultural History,” Agricultural History 78, no. 3 (2004): 293. Just as Butterfield would in his own writings, the commission argued that churches had a key social role to play in the shoring up of a rural civilization. They should become “social centers, places ‘whence constantly emanates influences that go to build up the moral and spiritual tone of the whole community.’ ” For this quote and discussion of the commission’s view on the role of churches, see Peters and Morgan, “The Country Life Commission,” 310. 13.  Kenyon Butterfield, “Christianity and Rural Civilization: Notes on the Rural Problem from the Point of View of Christian Missions,” in The Christian Mission in Relation to Rural Problems: Report of the Jerusalem Meeting of the International Missionary Council, March 24th– April 8th, 1928 (London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1928), 6:19. 14.  Butterfield, “Christianity and Rural Civilization,” 8. 15.  Kenyon Butterfield, The Country Church and the Rural Problem (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1911), v.

204     Notes 16. Butterfield, The Country Church, 25–26. Butterfield worried especially about what would happen if “hordes of peasants from abroad should settle upon our lands more rapidly than the somewhat sluggish social machinery of rural life can grind the grist.” He cited Max Weber, commenting that the growing number of “ ‘negro farms’ ” and the “ ‘enormous immigration of uncivilized elements from Eastern Europe’ ” were two factors that threatened to “gradually form a community of a quite different type from the great creation of the Anglo-­Saxon spirit.” 17. Butterfield, The Country Church, 45. The US Country Life Commission had also identified a lack of community spirit as a deficiency of unreconstructed rural life and concluded that cooperatives had an important role in creating it. See Peters and Morgan, “The Country Life Commission,” 309. 18.  Butterfield, “Christianity and Rural Civilization,” 21–23. 19.  “Statement Adopted by the Council: The Christian Mission in Relation to Rural Problems in Asia and Africa,” in The Christian Mission in Relation to Rural Problems: Report of the Jerusalem Meeting of the International Missionary Council, March 24th–April 8th, 1928 (London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1928), 290–292. 20.  Gary R. Hess, “American Agricultural Missionaries and Efforts at Economic Improvement in India,” Agricultural History 42, no. 1 (1968): 23. 21.  Kallaway, “Education, Health and Social Welfare,” 239–240. Glenn Reynolds also points out the Jerusalem genesis of the DSIR in his discussion of the Copper Belt study that led to the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. See Glenn Reynolds, “The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment and the Struggle for Hegemony in British East and Central Africa, 1935–1937,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 29, no. 1 (2009): 58. 22.  The Christian researchers assembled study materials in advance of the conference, and the Section XIII research on the church and the changing social and economic order was later compiled by Davis and published along with other material from the conference. See International Missionary Council, The Economic Basis of the Church; International Missionary Council Meeting at Tambaram, Madras, comp. J. Merle Davis (London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1939). Christian socialism was lifted in Britain by the writings of influential theologians like William Temple, who was archbishop of Canterbury from 1942 until his death in 1944. Temple made a critique of capitalism an important pillar of his political theology and argued for Christian action to build a new economic system that would place human need before profit. See Denis Janz, World Christianity and Marxism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 27–29. 23.  International Missionary Council, The Economic Basis of the Church, 594–604. 24.  International Missionary Council, The Economic Basis of the Church, 608. 25.  J. Merle Davis, foreword to International Missionary Council, The Economic Basis of the Church, v–vi (compiled by Davis for the International Missionary Council after its 1938 meeting at Tambaram, Madras). 26.  Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 112–114. 27.  John Dewey, The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1899), 30–31. 28. Zachariah, Developing India, 113.

Notes    205 29.  International Missionary Council, The Economic Basis of the Church, 606. 30.  Duane Spencer Hatch, Up from Poverty in Rural India, 4th ed. (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1938), 6. Like Claude Strickland, Hatch emphasized the importance of supervision. In his years of experience in India he found that whenever cooperatives failed it was because of lack of supervision. “With adequate, all-­the-­way, supervision,” he wrote, “co-­operation will succeed; without it, it will fail.” Hatch, Up from Poverty, 122–123. Strickland was aware and generally approved of the Martandam rural reconstruction center. In his review of the 1932 first edition of Hatch’s book in Oversea Education, Strickland credited the Martandam project for the emphasis it placed on courses in rural reconstruction “from which leadership is born,” though he also chided Hatch for not spelling out a more robust potential role for government in his plan. See Strickland, “Rural Reconstruction,” Oversea Education 4, no. 3 (1933): 112. 31.  Hatch included works by Brayne and Darling in the short bibliography for the first chapter setting up the main problem of his book. See Hatch, Up from Poverty in Rural India, 7. Brayne’s influence on community development practices in the British empire, as Radhika Natarajan has recently detailed, went well beyond India and extended to Africa and the Caribbean and had staying power for community developers beyond the Second World War. Radhika Natarajan, “ ‘Village Life and How to Improve It’: Textual Routes of Community Development in the Late British Empire,” in Reading the Postwar Future: Textual Turning Points from 1944, ed. Kirrily Freeman and John Munro (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 96–112. 32.  I draw this description of the mission work of the PCUSA in India and its ideological orientation in the early twentieth-­century (which resonates with the outlook that was the norm at the Moga School) from Prakash Kumar’s recent study of the agrarian ideals of American Presbyterians associated with Allahabad Agricultural Institute, especially his discussion of Higginbottom himself. See Prakash Kumar, “ ‘Modernization’ and Agrarian Development in India, 1912–1952,” Journal of Asian Studies 79, no. 3 (2020): 633–658 (especially pp. 636–640 for background on the PCUSA mission and Higginbottom’s ideological outlook). 33.  Moga was influential beyond the ICS in interwar debates about rural education. McKee’s successors at the school, Arthur and Irene Harper, were the only Americans invited to attend Gandhi’s 1937 Wardha Conference on education, which produced the Scheme of Basic of Education that would be endorsed by Congress and implemented after independence. See Gary R. Hess, “American Agricultural Missionaries and Efforts at Economic Improvement in India,” Agricultural History 42, no. 1 (1968): 30. 34.  Making Men at Moga (New York: Board of Foreign Missions, PCUSA, n.d.), 2. A copy of this is in PCUSA MT80/PSZ/PMAP. 35.  Village Teachers’ Journal, Moga 7, no. 5 (October 1927): 177–178. 36.  William J. McKee, “Examples of the Work of Christian Missions in Rural Areas,” in International Missionary Council, The Christian Mission in Relation to Rural Problems: Report of the Jerusalem Meeting of the International Missionary Council, March 24th– April 8th, 1928 (London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1928), 32–87. 37. McKee, “Examples of the Work of Christian Missions in Rural Areas,” 82–84. McKee’s source for the Higginbottom quote was Samuel Higginbottom, “The Training of

206     Notes Agricultural Teachers for India,” in Foreign Missions Conference of North America: Report of the Thirty-­Third Conference (1926). 38.  Paul B. Rich, “Bernard Huss and the Experiment in African Cooperatives in South Africa, 1926–1948,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 26, no. 2 (1993): 298–300. 39.  Bernard Huss, “The Significance of the Cooperative Movement in African Village Development,” in Village Education in Africa: Report of the Inter-­Territorial Jeanes Conference, Salisbury, S. Rhodesia, May 27th–June 6th, 1933 (Lovedale, South Africa: Lovedale Press, 1935), 264. 40.  Huss, “The Significance of the Co-­operative Movement in African Village Development,” 267. 41.  Bernard Huss, Agricultural Economics among American Negroes: Report of a Visit to the United States of America under the Auspices of the Visitors’ Grants Committee of the Carnegie Corporation of New York (Pretoria: The Carnegie Corporation of New York Visitors’ Grants Committee, 1931), vii–viii. It is worth noting that Jones set up the itinerary for Huss’s trip, which seems to have included visits to Jones’s former research home, Hampton Institute (at this point Jones was leading the Phelps-­Stokes Fund) and to Tuskegee. 42. Huss, Agricultural Economics among American Negroes, 13–14. 43.  Rich, “Bernard Huss and the Experiment in African Cooperatives in South Africa,” 307–310. 44.  Bernard Huss, “The Evolution of the South African Native Mind,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 4, no. 4 (1931): 448–453. 45.  Huss, “The Significance of the Cooperative Movement in African Village Development,” 262. 46.  See Oldham’s letters to Keppel dated April 30 and May 21, 1925, in which he discussed the Carnegie grant that would be used for the Jeanes school. They are in CCNY 188A/5. 47.  Kenneth R. Ross, “The Legacy of James Dougall,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 32, no. 4 (2008): 206. 48.  RH Mss, Afr. S1367(1), Evan Biss to J. W. C. Dougall, July 28, 1925. Biss, an inspector in the department and sometime acting director in the late 1920s, apparently had visited Moga and was impressed. He wrote to Dougall as the latter prepared to sail for Africa to take up his new post in 1925 that he hoped Dougall could develop McKee’s ideas at Jeanes, noting that the real success of McKee’s system was not to be primarily measured at Moga itself, “where there is a lot of money and the discipline of the Mission,” but in the villages, “especially those to which the Christian idea has not penetrated.” 49.  PCUSA RG 83/33/20 [Moga Training School, 1926–1947], “Annual Report of the Training School for Village Teachers, Punjab Mission, Presbyterian Church, USA, April 1, 1938 to March 31, 1939,” 4–5. Dougall wrote these and other lines of praise in the school’s visitor’s book in 1938–1939, several years after he left the Jeanes school. 50.  CCNY 188A/8, “Jeanes Training Centre, Nyasaland” [uncertain date, labeled “1930?”]. 51.  E. D. Bowman, “Jeanes Training and Rural Reconstruction in Nyasaland,” Oversea Education 4, no. 3 (1933): 114–116. 52.  Joanna Lewis, Empire State-Building: War and Welfare in Kenya, 1925–1952 (Oxford: James Currey, 2000), 52. See also Corrie Decker’s discussion of girls’ and women’s educa-

Notes    207 tion in East Africa with particular reference to Zanzibar. In the case of Zanzibar, it was the Protectorate government that persuaded the Colonial Office to support rural girls’ education there in the 1930s. See Corrie Decker, Mobilizing Zanzibari Women: The Struggle for Respectability and Self-­Reliance in Colonial East Africa (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 49–52. 53.  UK TNA CO 885/41, “Minutes of the Sixty Fourth Meeting of the Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies, 21 November, 1935.” See pp. 2–3 for T. G. Benson’s description of the cooperative community on the Jeanes campus. Benson succeeded ­Dougall as Jeanes principal and directed the school for most of the 1930s. 54.  KNA PC/NZA 3/902 (Ed. 3/8/1/2), “Jeanes School, Kenya: Annual Report for 1936.” See piece 46, p. 7 of the report. 55.  Mention of the Jeanes Teachers’ Widows and Orphans’ Fund (established in 1935) held at the cooperative bank is in KNA PC/NZA 3/902 (Ed. 3/8/1/2), piece 48, “Moto Mmoja, Jeanes School Kenya, Circular Letter No. 1., 1938.” 56.  Erik Linstrum, Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 3–4. 57.  Thomas Fallace, “Recapitulation Theory and the New Education: Race, Culture, Imperialism, and Pedagogy, 1894–1916,” Curriculum Inquiry 42, no. 4 (2012): 511. It is not clear whether Dougall himself was influenced by Dewey in this regard, but it seems others at the Jeanes school were at least aware of Dewey’s contribution to the theory. Handwritten notes on readings in educational theory (the notes probably were composed by Benson since they are among his Jeanes-­related papers at the Weston Library, Oxford) referenced Dewey’s School and Society as one of the texts to consult “especially for parallelism between individual and racial development.” See RH Mss. Afr. s.1367(2), verso of numbered p. 67. 58.  James W. C. Dougall, “Characteristics of African Thought,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 5, no. 3 (1932): 257–258. 59.  Dougall, “Characteristics of African Thought,” 265–266. 60.  Bowman, “Jeanes Training and Rural Reconstruction in Nyasaland,” 117. 61.  Timothy Burke reads the hygiene work of Jeanes teachers (he focuses on the Jeanes school in colonial Zimbabwe, Southern Rhodesia under British rule) as part of consumer capitalism, commodity culture, and a biopolitics concerned with the production of consumer products and competing knowledges about bodily care that hinged on the equation of cleanliness and civilization. See Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), esp. ch. 2 for discussion of the Jeanes school. 62.  Bowman, “Jeanes Training and Rural Reconstruction in Nyasaland,” 117. 63.  RH Mss Afr., S. 1367 JWC Dougall, “Circular Correspondence,” August 1927. 64.  KNA PC/NZA/3/901 (Ed. 3/8/1/1), piece 59. “Record of the 5th Annual Meeting of Jeanes Teachers in North and Central Kavirondo, July 25–26, 1938 at Vihiga (Maragoli).” 65.  Dougall, “Characteristics of African Thought,” 262–263. 66.  RH Mss, Afr. S1367(1), Dougall to unspecified “Friends,” June 4, 1929. Dougall occasionally wrote letters like these to update friends on the progress of the Jeanes school. 67.  CCNY 188A/5, Jeanes School, Kabete, Annual Report, 1932. See pp. 66–67 of the report. 68.  KNA PC/NZA 3/902 (Ed. 3/8/1/2), piece 46. Jeanes School, Kenya: Annual Report for 1936, p. 7.

208     Notes 69.  KNA PC/NZA 3/902 (Ed. 3/8/1/2), piece 28. Jeanes School, Kenya: Circular No. 1/34, March 20, 1934. 70.  KNA PC/NZA/3/901 (Ed. 3/8/1/1), piece 33. Summary of Instructions Issued to Jeanes Teachers in the Field, May 1932, Moto Mmoja vol. XI, no. 2. 71.  KNA PC/NZA 3/902 (Ed. 3/8/1/2), piece 13. Summary of Instructions, etc., Issued to Jeanes Teachers in the Field, Gazeti La Moto Mmoja, March 1933. 72.  KNA PC/NZA 3/902 (Ed. 3/8/1/2), piece 46. Jeanes School, Kenya: Annual Report for 1936, p. 20. 73.  KNA PC/NZA/3/901 (Ed. 3/8/1/1), piece 60. Nyanza Province Safari, 1938, entry for Samson and Alice Kipsamech, African Inland Mission, Litein. 74.  KNA PC/NZA 3/902 (Ed. 3/8/1/2), piece 46, Jeanes School, Kenya: Annual Report for 1936, p. 20. 75.  CCNY 188A/5, Jeanes School, Kabete, Annual Report, 1928, p. 1. 76.  Quoted in Lewis, Empire State-Building, 57. 77.  KNA NZA 3/902 (Ed. 3/8/1/2), Jeanes School Kenya, Circular no. 2/34, June 24, 1934. 78.  CCNY 188A/5, Jeanes School, Kabete, Annual Report, 1932, p. 70. 79.  CCNY 188A/5, Jeanes School, Kabete, Annual Report, 1932, part IV: Special Courses, I, Agricultural Demonstrators, Course of Training. See pp. 69–70 for Walford’s discussion of the temperance features of the Kangundo shop and how the spiritual side of cooperation could “be used by Officers of the administration and education etc. for furthering their aims.” 80.  KNA PC/NZA 3/902 (Ed. 3/8/1/2), piece 46, Jeanes School, Kenya: Annual Report for 1936, p. 20. 81.  CCNY 188A/5, Jeanes School, Kabete, Annual Report, 1932, part IV: Special Courses, I, Agricultural Demonstrators, Course of Training (emphasis in original). 82.  CCNY 188A/5, Jeanes School, Kabete, Annual Report, 1932, part IV. 83.  CCNY 188A/5, Jeanes School, Kabete,: Annual Report, 1932, part IV: Special Courses, I, Agricultural Demonstrators, Course of Training. 84.  J. W. C. Dougall, “Religious Education,” in Village Education in Africa: Report of the Inter-­Territorial Jeanes Conference, Salisbury, S. Rhodesia, May 27th–June 6th, 1933 (Lovedale, South Africa: Lovedale Press, 1935), 225–226. Dougall left his post as principal of the Kenya Jeanes school in 1931 and was at this point educational adviser to the Protestant missions in Kenya and Uganda. 85. Linstrum, Ruling Minds, 112–114. The psychologist was Richard Oliver. He published some of his findings in the journal Africa. See Richard A. C. Oliver, “Mental Tests in the Study of the African,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 7, no. 1 (1934): 40. 86.  Kenneth King, “The American Negro as Missionary to East Africa: A Critical Aspect of African Evangelism,” African Historical Studies 3, no. 1 (1970): 5–22. See p. 19 for Dougall’s quote. 87.  Kenneth King, Pan-­Africanism and Education: A Study of Race Philanthropy and Education in the Southern States of America and East Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 70. 88. Kevin K. Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 147–151. 89. King, Pan-­Africanism and Education, 69–71.

Notes    209 90.  Derek Peterson, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004), 99–102. 91. Daniel Kark, “Equivocal Empire: British Community Development in Central Africa, 1945–1955” (PhD diss., University of New South Wales, 2008), 165–167. 92. Decker, Mobilizing Zanzibari Women, 50–51. 93.  Carol Summers, Colonial Lessons: Africans’ Education in Southern Rhodesia, 1918– 1940 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002), 134–136. Summers quotes the chief native commissioner on p. 134. 94. Lewis, Empire State-­Building, 56. 95.  For a record of the discussion see the minute from the meeting forwarded by the provincial commissioner to the director of education. KNA PC/NZA/3/901 (Ed. 3/8/1/1), piece 65, “Provincial Commissioner, Nyanza Province to Director of Education,” April 5, 1939. 96.  KNA PC/NZA/3/901 (Ed. 3/8/1/1), piece 47, copy of extracts from letters between the district commissioner, North Kavirondo, and the principal, Jeanes School, Kabete [T. G. Benson], June 1937. 97.  Bruce Berman, Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: The Dialectic of Domination (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1990), 231–232. The organization’s membership was mostly Luo, so Owen formed a separate but similar organization for Luhya residents, the North Kavirondo Taxpayer Association (NKTWA). Berman argues that “ethnic parochialism and religious denominational differences” helped to fragment politics in Nyanza, and he notes there also was a Native Catholic Union. 98.  KNA PC/NZA/3/901 (Ed. 3/8/1/1), piece 47, copy of extracts from letters between the district commissioner, North Kavirondo, and the principal, Jeanes School, Kabete [T. G. Benson], June 1937. 99.  Bethwell A. Ogot, “Mau Mau and Nationhood: The Untold Story,” in Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority, and Narration, ed. John Lonsdale and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 12–14. See also Berman, Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya, 232. 100.  KNA PC/NZA/3/901 (Ed. 3/8/1/1), piece 41, “Provincial Commissioner, Nyanza to Director of Education, Nairobi,” August 7, 1934. 101.  Ogot, “Mau Mau and Nationhood,” 12–14. 102. Lewis, Empire State-Building, 80–81. 103. Mary Ciambaka Mwiandi, “The Jeanes School in Kenya: the Role of the Jeanes ­Teachers and their Wives in ‘Social Transformation’ of Rural Colonial Kenya, 1925–1961” (PhD diss., Michigan State University, 2006), 145–147. 104. Lewis, Empire State-Building, 332. 105.  Rosaleen Smyth, “The Roots of Community Development in Colonial Office Policy and Practice in Africa,” Social Policy and Administration 38, no. 4 (2004): 419. 106.  Colonial Office Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies [ACEC], Mass Education in African Society (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1943), 11–12. 107. ACEC, Mass Education in African Society, 15. 108. ACEC, Mass Education in African Society, 26–27. 109.  Films, for instance, should feature “trade unions, co-­operative societies, and local governments,” “provided, of course, the principles which determine their constitution

210     Notes and functioning are in fact the subject of the film.” See ACEC, Mass Education in African Society, 41. 110. ACEC, Mass Education in African Society, 55. 111.  The report averred, “So far in the British Colonies we have acted on the assumption that people would eventually adopt improved methods of agriculture, a more nutritious diet, and hygienic surroundings and western medical ideas without learning to read or write.” The ACEC arrived at its new conclusion that a mass literacy drive was necessary through its comparative study of mass education in the Dutch East Indies, China, and the Soviet Union, where mass literacy programs showed the importance of “adult literacy, as an essential means of achieving all-­round progress.” See ACEC, Mass Education in African Society, 14. 112. ACEC, Mass Education in African Society, 39–41. 113.  Here I follow Joanna Lewis’s argument that the wartime transformation, resonant particularly in the changing Kabete Jeanes program, was a waning of missionary oversight and a joining of a new type of (ex-­askari) government welfare worker with “the latest techniques in mass communication.” See Lewis, Empire State-Building, 232. 114.  The BEKE shot thirty-­five films. Unfortunately there are no extant copies of the four films shot at Moshi. Only three of the thirty-­five BEKE films survive: Veterinary Training of African Natives (1936), Tropical Hookworm (1936), and African Peasant Farms—The Kingolwira Experiment (1936). 115.  Glenn Reynolds has explored the BEKE’s history in depth and with particular attention to how African audiences experienced the films. He argues that the film project was part of a colonial struggle for hegemony, which from the British imperial point of view fit with other efforts to use film to “bind its African subjects to the metropole.” Glenn Reynolds, “The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment,” 57. See also Reynolds, “Image and Empire: Anglo-­American Cinematic Interventions in Sub-­Saharan Africa, 1921–1937,” South African Historical Journal 48, no. 1 (May 2003): 90–108. 116. ACEC, Mass Education in African Society, 44. For discussion of Sellers’s experiments in African “film literacy” and his influence (not least as organizer of the Colonial Film Unit), see James M. Burns, Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002), 39–51. 117.  KNA PC/NZA/3/1453 (L. & O. 14/1), “Memorandum by Mr. Kingston-­Davies of June, 1938: Suggestions for an Experiment in Film Exhibition to Native Audiences in the Central and Nyanza Provinces, Kenya.” It is not clear which of the four films made at Moshi featuring the KNCU was in the Kenya Education Department collection. It is listed only as “K.N.C.U.,” which was not a BEKE title. Kingston-­Davies was the same filmmaker who had been pressured by the Colonial Office to leave out mention of land politics in his proposed film on the Chagga of Kilimanjaro, as discussed in chapter 1. 118.  KNA NZA 3/902 (Ed. 3/8/1/2), piece 49, English Circular to accompany Jeanes teachers’ bulletin, Moto Mmoja, no. 2, July 1938. According to the circular an experiment was “now in working order at the school and a number of films of educational value are being exhibited,” though it did not specify that these were BEKE films. 119.  For a thorough discussion of the Copper Belt study and Davis’s insights about the potential of film to help solve “the Copperbelt crisis,” see Reynolds, “The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment,” 58–59.

Notes    211 120.  G. C. Latham and Leslie Alan Notcutt, The African and the Cinema (London: Edinburgh House Press, 1937), 25. 121.  J. Merle Davis, foreword to Latham and Notcutt, The African and the Cinema, 10. 122.  Latham and Notcutt, The African and the Cinema, 23–25. 123.  For Latham’s outline of reforms, see UK TNA CO 795/44/3, G. C. Latham, “Scheme for Native Education in Northern Rhodesia [1931].” The Jeanes school at Mazabuka opened with Carnegie funds in February 1930. See CCNY 188A/7, “Report on the Jeanes and Agricultural Schools at Mazabuka, January 1st, 1931.” The Carnegie Corporation also funded a Jeanes school for women at the Mbereshi mission station of the London Missionary Society. CCNY 188A/7, “The Jeanes School for Women at Mbereshi Station of the London Missionary Society,” 1931. 124.  CCNY 186/18, “Origin and History [printed document on BEKE letterhead, no date].” See also Reynolds, “The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment,” 61n20. 125.  J. Merle Davis, foreword to Latham and Notcutt, The African and the Cinema, 10. 126.  CCNY 186/18, “Origin and History [printed document on BEKE letterhead, no date].” 127.  J. Merle Davis, New Buildings on Old Foundations: A Handbook on Stabilizing the Younger Churches in their Environment (New York: International Missionary Council, 1945), 48–49. 128.  IMC Box 263129, fiche 1, Latham’s Journal, June 27, 1935. 129. Burns, Flickering Shadows, 27. 130.  One idea for a future film on soil erosion was to employ what the filmmakers called “the epic method” to convey the drama of a tribe becoming incrementally impoverished through soil erosion “and how prosperity was regained by the reclamation of these lands by tribal efforts on a large scale.” See Latham and Notcutt, The African and the Cinema, 141. 131.  For a description of the film see Latham and Notcutt, The African and the Cinema, 53–54. For their discussion of the technique of appropriating the demonstration plot, see Latham and Notcutt, The African and the Cinema, 141. 132.  Latham and Notcutt, The African and the Cinema, 40. 133. David Anderson and David Throup, “Africans and Agricultural Production in Colonial Kenya: The Myth of the War as a Watershed,” Journal of African History 26, no. 4 (1985): 330. 134.  Reynolds, “The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment,” 69. 135.  Latham and Notcutt, The African and the Cinema, 69–70. 136.  IMC Box 263129, fiche 1, Latham’s Journal, June 26, 1935. 137.  IMC Box 263129 fiche 2, L.A. Notcutt’s Diary, September 23, 1935. 138.  Latham and Notcutt, The African and the Cinema, 39–40. 139.  Latham and Notcutt, The African and the Cinema, 66–67. 140.  Edwin S. Munger, “African Coffee on Kilimanjaro: A Chagga Kihamba,” Economic Geography 28, no. 2 (1952): 181–185. 141.  Latham and Notcutt, The African and the Cinema, 66–67. 142.  Anderson and Throup, “Africans and Agricultural Production in Colonial Kenya,” 336–338. 143.  Latham and Notcutt, The African and the Cinema, 73. Ian Christie has remarked how arrival and departure shots were an important element of the imperial imaginary in

212     Notes early colonial film. See Ian Christie, “The Captains and the Kings Depart: Imperial Departure and Arrival in Early Cinema,” in Empire and Film, ed. Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (London: Palgrave British Film Institute, 2011), 21–33. 144.  G. C. Latham, “Indirect Rule and Education in East Africa,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 7, no. 4 (1934): 429. 145.  Notcutt is quoted in Burns, Flickering Shadows, 26. 146.  Latham and Notcutt, The African and the Cinema, 140. 147.  Latham and Notcutt, The African and the Cinema, 22. 148.  A recent study that illuminates the complexities of the relationship between missionaries, the old church in the metropole, and the new churches in decolonizing British Africa is John Stuart, British Missionaries and the End of Empire: East, Central, and Southern Africa, 1939–1964 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2011). 149.  Before it was pared down to focus only on British East and Central Africa, Davis’s original proposal to the Carnegie Corporation was for a study of film in the USSR, Egypt, and Northern Rhodesia. See Reynolds, “The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment,” 59–60. 150.  Mass literacy campaigns by the Soviet Union and by the Nationalist Government of China were singled out by the ACEC mass education subcommittee and praised for having helped to awaken “the national spirit of the whole people,” whose work in war industries underpinned the “sturdy resistance of the armies to the invading enemy.” See ACEC, Mass Education in Africa, 55. 151.  The film begins with shots of Maasai people and then a shot focused on a single cattle owner. Next comes a shot of dying cattle, followed by the cattle owner walking off to consult the “witch-doctor.” Latham and Notcutt found that such “continuity scenes” were essential for African audiences to follow the argument of a film, as they wrote: “The importance of the continuity scene, in this case, is to connect the dying herd scenes with the witch-­doctor, the owner being seen to leave his herd and a shot or two later to join the witch-­doctor.” See Latham and Notcutt, The African and the Cinema, 154–156. Another BEKE film, The Chief (1935), was also an anti–witch-doctor vehicle. The story revolved around the gradual undoing of a plot by a witch doctor to lead a village in resistance against a chief’s effort to start a mission school. See Latham and Notcutt, The African and the Cinema, 36–38. For discussion of this film see Reynolds, “The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment,” 63. 152.  Latham and Notcutt, The African and the Cinema, 35. 153.  Reynolds, “The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment, 67. C HA P T E R 3 . A N T I - E M P I R E , D EV E L O P M E N T, A N D E M E R G E N C Y RU L E

1.  For Protectorate officials’ discussion of military involvement, see UK TNA FCO 141/18405, “Record of a Meeting between His Excellency the Governor and G.O.C. East Africa Command, 2 May 1949.” For discussion of the subsequent sale of the cotton, see UK TNA FCO 141/18185, “Property of the Uganda African Farmers Union and Bataka Party [Chief Secretary to the Police Commissioner, March 9, 1950].” 2.  “Outlawed Society’s Cotton Seized,” Uganda Herald, May 6, 1949. Clearly some UAFU members received the news of the beginning of the cotton confiscations with

Notes    213 defiance. The next week the Herald announced that government was giving “the foolish people who were deceived [into thinking they would get a higher price by holding onto their cotton]” one last chance to sell. From May 16 to 28, 1949, Ganda farmers could sell their seed cotton to licensed buyers or else be prosecuted and risk having their cotton seized by police. “Holding of Raw Cotton in Buganda,” Uganda Herald, May 12, 1949. 3. UK TNA FCO 141/18185, Ignatius Musazi, “Some Observations on the Kingdon Report,” p. 18. This short pamphlet is a rare surviving print piece authored by Musazi. Written from London in May 1950 and signed “Issued for and on behalf of the Uganda African Farmers Union,” it was typed and clearly meant for wide distribution. In it Musazi argued that the crisis of 1949 was rooted in the cotton industry. Officials in Uganda believed the essay was being widely circulated in the United Kingdom by MP Fenner Brockway and the Congress of Peoples Against Colonialism. Musazi sent the essay from London to Samuel Lukabi, the treasurer of UAFU in Kampala, presumably for publication. Police were tipped off, and Lukabi was arrested for possessing the allegedly seditious text the moment he picked it up at the post office. See UK TNA FCO 141/18185, “J.W. Steil to P. Rogers, Esq., Colonial Office, 15 June, 1950 [Top Secret].” It is uncertain how widely the essay circulated in Uganda given the state’s interception of Lukabi’s copy. For the Kingdon report, see Uganda Protectorate, Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Disturbances in Uganda during April, 1949 [Compiled by Sir Donald Kingdon] (Entebbe: Printed by the Government Printer, 1950). 4.  Cohen and his wife, not understanding Luganda, joined in the applause for the ­dancers. Aili Mari Tripp retells the story from Governor Cohen’s unpublished memoir. Tripp notes the wide popularity of the story as part of Ugandan anti-­colonial political culture of the 1950s and cites the song, along with women’s mobilization against the deportation of the Kabaka in 1953 in official retribution for his support for Ugandan independence, as key moments in the growth of women’s involvement in Buganda politics. See Aili Mari Tripp, Women and Politics in Uganda (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 36–37. 5.  Emergencies were declared in the 1940s and 1950s in Cyprus, Malaya, Kenya, and numerous other places, and often these were part of an escalating battle against communist insurgency and nationalist movements. The emergency situations necessarily shaped the many different efforts to apply cooperative development throughout the empire after World War II. 6.  Along with other sources, Jonathon Earle has analyzed annotations and underscored passages from books in Musazi’s personal library to reveal his views on kingship and his interest in Laski. Earle argues that Musazi’s view of kingship—deployed in sharp critique of the then Kabaka Muteesa II—was a view widely shared by farmers of the movement. Musazi’s most deeply interrogated and dialogued books were the Bible, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, and Laski’s Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (1943). See Jonathon Earle, Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire: Political Thought and Historical Imagination in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 43, for the quote about kings who dismissed chiefs “at will,” and 73–76 for Earle’s reading of Musazi’s annotations of Laski. For Gandhi’s influence on Musazi, see George Shepherd, They Wait in Darkness (New York: John Day Company, 1955), 164–165. 7. Earle, Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire, 71. For discussion of the 1945 events, see David Apter, The Political Kingdom in Uganda: A Study in Bureaucratic Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 226–233.

214     Notes 8.  D. A. Low and John Lonsdale, “Introduction: Towards the New Order, 1945–1963,” in History of East Africa, ed. D. A. Low and Alison Smith, vol. 3 (London: Oxford University Press, 1976). For more recent discussions of their influential argument, see Joseph Morgan Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), 207–209; see also Joanna Lewis, Empire State-Building: War and Welfare in Kenya, 1925–1952 (Oxford: James Currey, 2000), 249. Lewis argues that in fact the new proliferation of rural, administrative services presented a paradox for the colonial state. It at once “provided a theory and a moral rearmament of government,” but it also spelled out the end of empire since the state “could not find adequate practical means to achieve its [welfare] remit.” See Lewis, Empire StateBuilding, 258. 9.  For discussion of this postwar turn in food politics and governance, including the FAO and the UN Hot Springs conference, see James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007), 152–158. 10.  The FAO organized conferences and produced studies of cooperative development and rural credit. See H. J. Louwes, Use of the Revolving Capital Plan by Co-­operative Associations (Rome: FAO, 1951); Bernard Binns, Agricultural Credit for Small Farmers (Rome: FAO, 1951); FAO, Co-­operative Thrift, Credit and Marketing in Economically Under-­ Developed Countries (Rome: FAO, 1953); FAO, Rural Progress through Co-­operatives: The Place of Co-­operative Associations in Agricultural Development (New York: UN Economic Affairs and FAO, 1954); and Margaret Digby and R. H. Gretton, Co-­operative Marketing for Agricultural Producers (Rome: FAO, 1955). See also Otto Schiller’s study of cooperative farming and land consolidation on behalf of the FAO and the Punjab Cooperative Union, Individual Farming on Co-­operative Lines (Lahore: Punjab Cooperative Union, 1956). 11.  United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture, Hot Springs, Virginia, May 18– June 3, 1943, Final Act and Section Reports (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1943), 20. 12. Hodge, Triumph of the Expert, 234–236. 13.  Soon after the war the postwar colonial government in Ghana for the first time issued licenses to African cooperatives that allowed them to sell members’ crops to the Cocoa Marketing Board set up at the outset of the war to control prices; by imposing tight control on these cooperatives through the colony’s new Cooperative Department, officials hoped to improve the quality of the colony’s cocoa. See Crawford Young, Neal P. Sherman, and Tim H. Rose, Cooperatives and Development: Agricultural Politics in Ghana and Uganda (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 181–186. See also the Fabian Colonial Bureau’s discussion of the Ghana cooperative movement in Co-­operation in the Colonies: A Report of a Special Committee to the Fabian Colonial Bureau (London: Allen and Unwin, 1945), 68–73. 14.  Secretary of State Oliver Lyttelton, who took over the Colonial Office when the Conservatives returned to power, sent out a circular to selected colonial governments asking them to explore schemes to expand rice cultivation, and he referenced the communist threat in Malaya and Hong Kong. A copy of Lyttelton’s “Priority Circular 826/52, 19 August, 1952” is in ZNA AB 4/98. 15.  Zanzibar was considered by the Colonial Office to be a prime place for rice growing. The idea to use cooperatives to organize rice growing offered slow solutions if we consider

Notes    215 that the Defense Powers ordinance held over from the war allowed the Zanzibar government to simply dictate growers’ farming choices, which it did with rice through an official order “to compel all able-­bodied rice cultivators” to plant on portions of their land by specified dates. ZNA AB 4/98, “Director of Agriculture to the Chief Secretary, 5 October, 1952.” 16.  The influence of the Fabian Colonial Bureau on the Labour Party is well documented in the post-­1945 chapters in Partha Sarathi Gupta, Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, 1914–1964 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1975). For discussion of the bureau’s lobbying on cooperation, see Rita Rhodes, Empire and Co-­operation: How the British Empire Used Co-­operatives in its Development Strategies, 1900–1970 (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2012), 237–243. 17.  Fabian Colonial Bureau, Co-­operation in the Colonies. The quote is from an unnumbered page of Strickland’s foreword to the book. Strickland’s published work was a major source for the special committee, which included, among other members, Margaret Digby of the Horace Plunkett Foundation, Malcolm Darling (former Punjab Registrar ), Arthur Creech Jones (soon to be secretary of state for the colonies), and Leonard Woolf. 18.  Fabian Colonial Bureau, Co-­operation in the Colonies, 95. 19.  Fabian Colonial Bureau, Co-­operation in the Colonies, 185–186. 20.  The Cooperative Movement in the Colonies: Despatches dated 20th March, 1946 and 23rd April, 1946, from the Secretary of State for the Colonies to Colonial Governments (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1946). Full copy found in UK TNA CO 67/347/3. 21.  Cooperative Movement in the Colonies, 4–5. The model ordinance was prepared by E. H. Lucette, the former Registrar of Co-­operative Societies in Ceylon, in conjunction with B. J. Surridge, former Cyprus Cooperatives Registrar. 22.  B. J. Surridge and Margaret Digby, A Manual of Cooperative Law and Practice (Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons, 1948). The book was dedicated to former Punjab Registrar Calvert and relied heavily on Calvert’s book, The Law and Principles of Co-­operation: Being the Co-­operative Societies Act no. II of 1912 with Introduction, Notes and an Appendix (Calcutta: Thacker and Spink, 1921). Surridge and Digby used Calvert’s 1933 third edition. 23.  Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 75–77. 24.  Cooperative Movement in the Colonies, 7. 25.  Uganda Protectorate, Commission of Inquiry into the Progress of the Co-­operative Movement in Mengo, Masaka and Busoga Districts (Entebbe: Government Printers, 1952), 19. 26.  Uganda Protectorate. Annual Report of the Department of Community Development for the Year Ended 31 December, 1952 (Entebbe: Government Printers, 1952), 12. 27.  Classes for both Cooperative Department staff and wives of cooperative assistants are included in the list of courses for Nsamizi for 1958–1959. See Report of the Department of Community Development for the Six Months 1st January, 1959 to 30 June, 1959 (Entebbe: Government Printers, 1959), 4–6. 28.  Arthur Gaitskell, Gezira: A Story of Development in the Sudan (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), 246. 29. Gaitskell, Gezira, 286. The community development focus of the Tennessee Valley Authority is often eclipsed by its aspect as modernist big development. But Immerwahr reminds us that communitarian ideas of development were built into the renowned regional development scheme, largely due to the influence of one of the TVA’s main

216     Notes architects, Arthur Morgan. Immerwahr notes that even if the TVA seems to have failed to deliver much on its promise of democracy and decentralization, the communitarian impulse was “heartfelt” and connected to Morgan’s “comprehensive social vision.” See Immerwahr, Thinking Small, 42–44. 30. Gaitskell, Gezira, 21. 31. Gaitskell, Gezira, 298–299. 32.  Victoria Bernal, “Cotton and Colonial Order in Sudan: A Social History with Emphasis on the Gezira Scheme,” in Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History in Sub-­Saharan Africa, ed. Allen Isaacman and Richard Roberts (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995), 106. 33.  Maurits W. Ertsen, Improvising Planned Development on the Gezira Plain, Sudan, 1900–1980 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 176. 34.  For discussion of Worthington’s earlier research on Africa and especially his work on the African Research Survey, see Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 105–112. 35.  Uganda Protectorate, A Development Plan for Uganda (Entebbe: Government Printers, 1947), 84–85. 36.  Uganda Protectorate, A Development Plan for Uganda, vi. 37.  For discussion in comparative colonial perspective of the variety of techniques of resistance, often invisible or illegible to colonial authorities, by which peasants “shaped the outcome of colonial cotton development,” see Allen Isaacman and Richard Roberts, “Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History in Sub-­Saharan Africa: Introduction” in Isaacman and Roberts, Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History in Sub-­Saharan Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995), 37. 38.  Stephen G. Bunker, Peasants against the State: The Politics of Market Control in Bugisu, Uganda, 1900–1983 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 30. From the Gisu perspective the political history of cooperatives there started with local protests against the machinations of the all-­European board of the Bugisu Coffee Scheme to hold down coffee prices while they should have been booming during the war. Faced with the rationale of staving off inflation, the board decided to divert a portion of the returns and place them in a development fund. Farmers protested, and “a coalition of Bagisu civil servants, lineage leaders, and political activists began a concerted campaign to establish cooperative marketing of the crop.” Bunker, Peasants against the State, 50–51. 39.  Uganda Protectorate, A Development Plan for Uganda , iii–iv. 40.  Mahmood Mamdani, Politics and Class Formation in Uganda (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), 72. 41. Mamdani, Politics and Class Formation in Uganda, 143. 42. D. A. Low and R. C. Pratt, Buganda and British Overrule, 1900–1955 (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 282. 43.  UK TNA 536/224/7, “[The Federations, etc.] Proposals for the Re-­organization of Coffee Marketing in Uganda, December 1, 1951.” In the document, the Federation of Partnerships of Uganda African Farmers, the successor organization to the UAFU after the UAFU was banned, laid out the case against the racially discriminatory dual marketing board system in a set of written proposals to the Uganda director of agriculture in December 1951. They demanded that if the government insisted on keeping two marketing boards, these should be designated by type of coffee rather than by race.

Notes    217 44.  Young, Sherman, and Rose divide cooperative development in Uganda into several phases, including a 1930s to early 1950s phase of “embryonic development” when cooperatives were a “channel for protest leadership” (culminating in the “meteoric rise” of the UAFU). From the 1950s through the late 1960s cooperatives grew in scale and autonomy, until Obote brought them under tight political control after 1967. See Young, Sherman, and Rose, Cooperatives and Development, 57–60. 45.  A Colonial Office discussion in 1934 of the possibility of Uganda cooperatives can be found in UK TNA CO 536/180/10. See especially Sir Cecil Bottomley’s minute on January 11, 1934. Bottomley, the assistant under-­secretary, called himself “enough a disciple of Mr. Strickland to be shy of improvisation.” 46.  UK TNA CO 536/195/4, “Letter from R.B. Haney of the Joint East African Board to the Under Secretary of State, Colonial Office, May 15, 1937.” 47.  The arguments of the anti-­bill contingent of the Legislative Council’s Special Committee tasked with evaluating the bill were summarized by the Uganda Solicitor General in “Confidential Memorandum on the Co-­operative Societies Bill” and considered by the Uganda Executive Council and forwarded to the Colonial Office. That memorandum is in UK TNA CO 536/195/4. For brief discussion of opposition to the bill, see Young, Sherman, and Rose, Cooperatives and Development, 59. 48.  See, for example, J. E. W. Flood’s minute of October 16, 1937, in UK TNA CO 536/195/4, in which he called the alarm over the political danger posed by cooperatives “rubbish” since government could control the societies. Flood did recognize the threat of African cooperatives to Indian and European ginnery owners and buyers, though he was hardly sympathetic. He disparaged the anti-­bill arguments as the views of “a few short-­sighted white merchants and still shorter-­sighted Indians” who saw “in the growth of co-­operation the writing on their own particular wall.” See Flood’s minute of October 20, 1937, in the same file. 49.  Margaret Kohn, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 50.  RH Mss, Ind, Ocn. s. 93 (1), “Message from A. Cavendish to the All Malayan Urban Cooperative Conference at Kuala Lumpur, on March 6th and 7th, 1948,” p. 41. 51.  Cheah Boon-Kheng, “The Left-Wing Movement in Malaya, Singapore and Borneo in the 1960s: ‘An Era of Hope or Devil’s Decade?,’ ” Inter-­Asia Cultural Studies 7, no. 4 (2006): 643. 52.  A cooperatives law was in place in Cyprus as early as 1914, and the government had built up cooperative bureaucratic infrastructure since then, targeting especially rural credit for the island’s indebted small-­plot peasantry. See Fabian Colonial Bureau, Co-­operation in the Colonies, 124–125. 53.  During the war cooperative shops increased dramatically and became important distribution channels for rationed goods to the villages. Similar techniques of wartime distribution utilizing cooperatives were deployed elsewhere in the empire, for instance in Ceylon, where the government operated a wholesale business to supply consumer shops with rationed goods. Surridge and Digby, A Manual of Co-­operative Law and Practice, 32. 54.  UK TNA CO 67/347/3, B. J. Surridge’s minute of June 5, 1947. Surridge recommended that Nicosia pass new rules governing consumer societies at large in order to prevent AKEL from gaining power in the Cooperative Central Bank, which was “the key to the control of the cooperative movement” on the island.

218     Notes 55.  UK TNA CO 67/347/3, Mr. Barton’s minute of June 6, 1947. 56.  UK TNA CO 67/347/3, “Extract from Minutes of Executive Council Meeting held at Government House, Nicosia, on Tuesday, 15th April, 1947, at 11 a.m.” 57.  John Stonehouse, Prohibited Immigrant (London: The Bodley Head, 1960), 74. 58.  “Chinese Reds Fire on British Warships” and “Threatened Kampala Strike,” Uganda Herald, April 23, 1949. For the editorial comment on communist agitators, see “Thought for the Week,” Uganda Herald, May 7, 1949. 59.  While the Kingdon report ultimately called the disturbances a planned rebellion against the Kabaka, officials in the Protectorate Government were torn when considering causes. Some thought the protests were the result of grievances about land tenure and marketing stemming from the original appropriations of land in the setting up of British indirect rule under the 1900 Agreement (which is exactly how Musazi and Mulumba talked about them). Others believed the disturbances sprang from concern among Baganda over plans for closer union with Kenya and the possibility that Kenya land relations would prevail in Buganda (which was indeed an animating concern for many Africans in Uganda). However they saw the underlying causes, officials tended to place blame primarily on the shoulders of leaders of the protests, dismissing their motivations as pure intrigue born from the leaders’ desire for power in government. As the British Resident of Buganda put it “The leaders exploited to the full their knowledge that the easiest way to gain popular support was to call on the Baganda to protect their rights over their land and their produce.” See minute of September 3, 1949, signed by “R. B.,” in UK TNA FCO 141/18130. 60.  The connection between the Ganda and Kikuyu movements was not purely official paranoia. Musazi met at least twice with Jomo Kenyatta and other leaders of the Kenya African Union to discuss the political situation in East Africa (though this was in 1952 after Musazi started the Uganda National Congress). According to Shepherd, the first meeting between Musazi and Kenyatta apparently was cut short when Kenyatta objected to the presence of Shepherd, a white man. Shepherd, They Wait in Darkness, 264–270. 61.  Protectorate officials delighted in the success of these air power operations, though the flights were officially designated reconnaissance missions and reported as such to the press. See minute for item 12 in UK TNA FCO 141/18130. 62.  Musazi, “Some Observations on the Kingdon Report,” p. 28, in UK TNA FCO 141/18185. 63. The anti-­colonial Mau Mau insurgency was especially powerful among Kikuyu squatter laborers on white settler estates in the Kenya highlands. For a study of the politics of the Kikuyu dispossessed, see Tabitha Kanogo, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905–1963 (London: James Currey, 1987). 64.  HC Deb, November 14, 1952, vol. 507, c1313. C HA P T E R 4 . U G A N DA’ S A N T I - C O L O N IA L C O O P E R AT I V E M OV E M E N T

1.  Musazi, “Some Observations on the Kingdon Report,” p. 1, in UK TNA FCO 141/18185. 2.  Mahmood Mamdani, Politics and Class Formation in Uganda (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), 41–42. 3. Mamdani, Politics and Class Formation in Uganda, 152. As Mamdani explains, the new law that helped to structure the pattern of small plot tenancies was the 1928 Busulu

Notes    219 and Nvujjo Law (names for two different kinds of taxes: Busulu = land rent; Nvujjo = a cash-­crop payment). 4.  David Apter, The Political Kingdom in Uganda: A Study in Bureaucratic Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961). See pp. 256–257 for discussion of late 1940s Baganda concerns about Colonial Office plans for “Inter-­Territorial Organization in East Africa.” For discussion of earlier “Closer Union” debates and other concerns to do with neighboring settler-­ruled Kenya, see Apter, Political Kingdom, 177–180. 5.  According to Holly Hanson, Baganda continued to think about their social relations in terms of reciprocal obligation and the securing and protection of followers. In taking up tenancy on mailo land, many thousands of Baganda (from much lower down in the social hierarchy than the chiefs of indirect rule) effectively “replicated chiefship on a small scale by becoming owners of relatively small amounts of land and offering a reduced level of protection and patronage to followers.” Holly Elisabeth Hanson, Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003), 166, 177. 6. Hanson, Landed Obligation, 128. As Hanson interrogates the problem of mailo: “What happened to the authority of ancestors buried in land to claim it for their descendants and influence the living if land could be owned by people who were not descendants of the ancestors buried there?” 7. Hanson, Landed Obligation, 216–218. According to Hanson, representatives of the Abataka (clan heads) protested the institution of mailo early on, especially in the 1920s, arguing for a restoration of structures of authority, reciprocal obligation, and land tenure from before the 1900 Agreement. 8.  Carol Summers, “Local Critiques of Global Development: Patriotism in Late Colonial Buganda,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 47, no. 1 (2014): 28. For discussion of the overlapping membership of UAFU and the Bataka Party, see Apter, Political Kingdom, 258. Apter notes that many lower-­ranked chiefs also participated as members of the Bataka Party. 9.  Summers, “Local Critiques,” 34. 10.  Derek Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent, c. 1935–1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 80. 11.  Carol Summers, “Radical Rudeness: Ugandan Social Critiques in the 1940s,” Journal of Social History 39, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 741–770. As Summers explains, “For Buganda’s activists, the effectiveness and power of civility, manners, and polite institutions meant that disrupting them was an essential pre-­requisite for true change or popular politics.” See Summers, “Radical Rudeness,” 761. See also Peterson’s discussion of Bataka activists’ “offensive politics.” Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism, 81–93. 12. Apter, Political Kingdom, 255–256. See especially n28. 13.  UK TNA FCO 141/18212, piece 56, Letter from Semakula Mulumba to the Kabaka [copy to United Nations], November 11, 1948. 14.  Musazi, “Some Observations on the Kingdon Report,” p. 26. 15.  Jonathon L. Earle, Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire: Political Thought and Historical Imagination in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 43. 16.  One of Musazi’s annotations of Laski’s Reflections on the Revolution of our Time (1943) that Jonathon Earle has uncovered is a note in response to an eloquent Laski passage that connected the French Revolution to the “ ‘spacious dreams of 1848,’ ” the “ ‘supreme

220     Notes optimism’ ” of Marx and Engels, and the “ ‘sudden sense of emancipation felt by the whole world’ ” when the despotic Russian tsar was toppled. Musazi wrote in the margin: “ ‘True [;] May it come in Buganda of today?’ ” Earle cautions, though, that Musazi “was able to draw from Laski what he needed” while still placing hope in the restoration of a powerful, equitable king. Earle, Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire, 74–75. 17.  Musazi, “Some Observations on the Kingdon Report,” pp. 25–26, in UK TNA FCO 141/18185. 18.  Musazi advocated an overhaul of the 1900 Agreement and argued that Africans should be given “the opportunity to establish free direct trade with Great Britain and the Commonwealth.” See Musazi, “Some Observations on the Kingdon Report,” p. 28. 19.  Musazi, prefatory public letter entitled “Uganda” appearing before “Some Observations on the Kingdon Report.” 20.  Musazi’s use of the idea of the New Africa is recorded by Shepherd. Shepherd dedicated They Wait in Darkness, his memoir about his involvement with the UAFU, to Musazi and Abu Mayanja, “true comrades and friends. May their dream of Africa Empya (the New Africa) be realized.” 21.  According to Stonehouse the cooperative farm experiment did not last many seasons and required some wage labor from the start. See John Stonehouse, Prohibited Immigrant (London: The Bodley Head, 1960), 83–84, for a description of the experiment. 22.  Musazi, “Some Observations on the Kingdon Report,” p. 21, UK TNA FCO 141/18185. 23. Shepherd, They Wait in Darkness, 92–93. 24.  Stonehouse commented that Lukabi was “bent over his ledgers diligently making entries for hours every day.” See Stonehouse, Prohibited Immigrant, 45. 25.  This description of the organizational levels of the UAFU and Federation is taken from Apter, who was largely quoting George Shepherd’s description. According to Apter, the federation used the “same units” as the UAFU. See Apter, Political Kingdom, 311–312. 26.  UK TNA CO 822/420, Mr. Rogers’ minute, August 6, 1952. 27.  Musazi, “Some Observations on the Kingdon Report,” p. 15. 28.  Musazi, “Some Observations on the Kingdon Report,” p. 22. 29.  Musazi, “Some Observations on the Kingdon Report,” p. 22. 30. Apter, Political Kingdom, 258. 31.  Two important recent contributions to this field are James Brennan, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), and Jonathon Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 32. Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones, 161–163. 33. Brennan, Taifa, 2. 34. Brennan, Taifa, 10-­11. 35. Brennan, Taifa, 19. 36. Brennan, Taifa, 192. 37.  In his effort to get Federation coffee cured, Musazi worked with Jesabhai Patel in Uganda, a connection that Apa Pant, the India High Commissioner in Nairobi, helped Musazi to forge. See George Shepherd, They Wait in Darkness (New York: John Day Company, 1955), 154–155.

Notes    221 38.  Musazi, “Some Observations on the Kingdon Report,” p. 21. Indians also were formally excluded from membership in the farmers cooperative union as of 1952 when membership rules changed—in what was now called the Federation of Partnerships of Uganda African Farmers—to stipulate that shares could only be held by people of “ ‘pure African descent,’ ” which mirrored the membership terms of Musazi and Mulumba’s African League in London. See Apter, Political Kingdom, 314. 39.  UK TNA FCO 141/18405, “H. H. the Kabaka Interviews 8 Representatives of the People on 25.4.49.” 40.  David Apter summed up the political moment in Buganda as one in which “the image of despoilation [sic] and deprivation, of lost opportunity as a kind of slavery, of rank without superiority, penetrated almost everywhere.” See Apter, Political Kingdom, 259. 41.  “H.H. the Kabaka Interviews 8 Representatives.” 42.  See UK TNA FCO 141/18401, “Draft Memorandum by the Uganda Govt. on the Report of the Commission of Inquiry [Kingdon Report] into the Civil Disturbances in Uganda during April, 1949,” January 1950, pp 18–23. In addition to requiring licenses for political rallies, the new rule made it an offense to address an unlicensed crowd that had grown beyond the limit. Police were sent to confront the crowd as soon as it crossed the five-­hundred-­person threshold, and they started by arresting the known leaders of the Bataka Union and the UAFU the moment they spoke. 43. Apter, Political Kingdom, 260. 44.  “Kampala Proclaimed ‘Disturbed Area,’ ” Uganda Herald, April 27, 1949. In official discussions about how to build up police capacities in the immediate wake of the disturbances, Commissioner of Police I. Stourton advocated recruiting a permanent, smaller-­scale version of Kenya’s Special Constabulary Force of Indians and Europeans to patrol neighborhoods. See UK TNA FCO 141/18405, “[Top Secret] Record of a Discussion Between His Excellency the Governor and the Unofficial Members of the Legislative Council, Concerning the Expansion of the Police Services, Held in the Secretariat on the afternoon of the 19th of May, 1949.” See especially pp. 4–5 of the notes on the discussion. 45. “Refugees,” Uganda Herald, April 30, 1949. 46.  “Our Temporary Refugees” [letter to the editor signed by “Makalai”], Uganda Herald, May 3, 1949. 47.  The twelve sazas were Kyadondo, Busiro, Kyagwe, Mawokota, Buddu, Singo, Bulemezi, Butambala, Gomba, Busujju, Bugerere, and Buruli. See FCO 141/18130, piece 86. 48.  The official Commission of Inquiry report concluded that the protests and disturbances were part of a failed uprising against the Kabaka and placed blame particularly on the UAFU and the Bataka Union. See Sir Donald Kingdon, Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Disturbances in Uganda during April, 1949 (Entebbe: Printed by the Government Printer, 1950). For a distillation of the Kingdon Report’s findings into a concise narrative of events, see Apter, Political Kingdom, 256–262. 49.  The emergency laws were published in the Uganda Gazette in the last week of April 1949. Copies of all the ordinances and proclamations are in FCO 141/18404. 50. Lewis, Empire State-Building, 244. And yet, as Lewis shows, wartime propaganda and postwar propaganda were very different projects, and in many ways the community development publicity of the postwar era posed an impossible task. Underfunded and

222     Notes always already a minimal agency within the state, plans for welfare through self-­help and community development were scuttled finally by organized resistance from a European community that feared loss of access to African labor as well as the specter of postwar British socialism. See 265–278 for detailed discussion of settler opposition to social welfare. 51.  Uganda Protectorate, A Development Plan for Uganda, vi. 52. Shepherd, They Wait in Darkness, 92. 53.  Annual Report of the Public Relations and Social Welfare Department for the Year Ended 31st December, 1949 (Entebbe: Government Printers, 1950), 10–12. Copy consulted in ZAN BE 29/1. 54.  The production of “counterpropaganda” was overseen by the Protectorate’s chief secretary and coordinated with DPRSW to shape messages. The overarching strategy was to undermine the credibility of the independent cooperative movement and to give “widespread and continuous publicity to the positive and the solid achievement of Government in the interests of the people.” This positive publicity was to be especially focused on promoting the government’s plans for cooperative marketing and to help finance African cooperatives’ entry into large-­scale, licensed ginning. For discussion of the publicity strategy, see “Letter from the Acting Chief Secretary, Uganda Protectorate, to the Acting Resident. 3 Sept, 1948,” FCO 141/18211, piece 48. 55.  Regular development publicity did not stop during the Emergency. While the cinema vans were often seconded for police broadcasting, they were still utilized for 1,179 film showings to an astounding cumulative audience of 540,000 throughout the year. Annual Report . . . for the Year Ended 31st December, 1949, 4. 56.  Annual Report for the Year Ended 31st December, 1949, 1–2. 57.  Carol Summers, “Slander, Buzz and Spin: Telegrams, Politics and Global Communications in the Uganda Protectorate, 1945–55,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 16, no. 3 (2015). 58. Shepherd, They Wait in Darkness, 55. Unfortunately it is only possible at the moment for me to think about these songs as media and not for their messages. Shepherd mentions them, but to my knowledge they were never recorded, nor am I aware of any archive containing lyrics. It is possible that some of the songs may survive in memories or private collections of former UAFU farmers and their families. Thanks to Holly Hanson for drawing my attention to these songs and to their potential importance as sources for understanding the cooperative movement in Uganda. 59.  We can see the genesis of the talking point in UK TNA FCO 141/18211, “[Top Secret and Personal] Acting Governor to J. H. Wallace, Esq., Colonial Office, September 1, 1948.” It ended up as a written answer to a question by Peter Macdonald, Conservative MP from the Isle of Wight. See HC Deb, November 3, 1948, vol. 457, c79W. 60. UK TNA FCO 141/18211, Copies of Questions and Answers in Parliament for November 3, 1948. 61.  UK TNA FCO 141/18211, Press clipping of the story in which the quote appears: “M.P. Asks about Mulumba and the Bataka,” East African Standard, November 5, 1948. The clipping seems to have been logged in the Uganda Secretariat files solely to prove to officials reading the file that the Ugandan government’s propaganda was effective: that it could suggest a point of view to Whitehall, have it endorsed there (at the epicenter of imperial

Notes    223 power), and then be turned into local African news, amplifying the government’s messaging about the political conflict in Buganda. 62.  Philip Murphy, Party Politics and Decolonization: The Conservative Party and British Colonial Policy in Tropical Africa, 1951–1964 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 143–144. 63.  As was done by the Movement for Colonial Freedom, in which Brockway was much involved. See Josiah Brownell, “The Taint of Communism: The Movement for Colonial Freedom, the Labour Party, and the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1954–1970,” Canadian Journal of History 42, no. 2 (Autumn 2007): 242–243. 64. Shepherd, They Wait in Darkness, 166–167. Shepherd does not specify which MP asked the question or when it was asked. It seems most likely to have been James Johnson, Labour MP from Rugby. In June 1951 he asked about the prices paid for coffee to Africans versus the world coffee price. HC Deb, June 6, 1951, vol. 488, c1004–c1005. 65.  Brockway told the colonial secretary that Musazi had spent his time in the United Kingdom “seeking to learn all he can about the Cooperative Movement and about the practical work which is being done for and by peasants and farmers in different countries by the application of Co-­operative principles.” See UK TNA CO 536/224/7, “Report on Uganda” [by Fenner Brockway], p. 8. John Rankin of the Co-­operative Party spoke up in the House of Commons against Musazi’s rustication to northern Uganda, claiming that the Co-­operative Party, “which represents a considerable section of opinion in this country,” had investigated the situation in Uganda and found Musazi “completely vindicated.” See HC Deb, February 28, 1951, vol. 484, c2074. John and Barbara Stonehouse of the Co-­operative Party (John was a future party MP and future president of the London Cooperative Society [LCS], and Barbara was a future member of the LCS Political Committee) moved to Uganda to work with the Federation in 1952. According to Apter, Labour MP Eirene White also was in active touch with Musazi. See Apter, Political Kingdom, 235. Other Labour and Co-­operative Party parliamentary allies who represented the struggles of the farmers in speeches, parliamentary questions, or letters to Colonial Office officials included Leslie Hale, Norman Dodds, and Richard Acland. Acland wrote to the newly appointed governor (replacing Hall), Andrew Cohen, before Cohen left the Colonial Office for his new post in Uganda to urge him to work with the Federation, since Acland felt “very strongly that this Federation and its possible development hold the key to a great deal of the possible future growth of the African community.” See UK TNA CO 536/224/7, Richard Acland to A. B. Cohen, December 12, 1951. 66.  Marc Matera has recently highlighted how spaces of “Black London” became sites of “black intellectual and cultural production” where “intellectuals, artists, and activists” from Africa and the Caribbean met, started organizations, “confronted their differences,” and forged “precarious political solidarities.” See Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 13. 67.  UK TNA FCO 141/18212, “Report on a Meeting Which Was Held under the Auspices of the Coloured Workers’ Association of Great Britain and the Agricultural Workers of Uganda at Holborn Hall, London, W.C. on the 8th June, 1949” (this police spy’s report is found near the end of this very long file).

224     Notes 68.  Kevin K. Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 34. For another study that, like Gaines’s book, treats Padmore in the context of the anti-­imperial and anti-­racist international networks in which he operated, see Leslie James, George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-­Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire (London: Palgrave, 2015). For a close treatment of Padmore’s engagement with Marxism, the Comintern, his expulsion from it, and a study of his politics and life in London, see Susan Pennybacker’s chapter “George Padmore and London” in her book From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 69.  George Padmore, Africa: Britain’s Third Empire (London: Dennis Dobson, 1949), 9–13. 70.  Leslie James notes Padmore’s general objection to Fabian politics and their “progressive, moderate tactics towards Britain’s colonial possessions.” James, George Padmore and Decolonization from Below, 76–77. 71.  As Padmore wrote, “If we are told that there are too many difficulties in the way of co-­operative enterprise in Africa, then we shall reply that the obstacles to African advancement are inherent in the colonial system under which we live.” Padmore, Africa, 179. 72. Padmore, Africa. For discussion of the controversy around Padmore’s publication of Africa (as well as his take on the earlier 1945 “riot”), see Carol Polsgrove, Ending British Rule in Africa: Writers in a Common Cause (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009), 101–102. 73.  George Padmore, “The Bataka Movement in Uganda,” The Crisis, January 1950, 66. 74.  Semakula Mulumba’s letter introducing the African League to new members can be found as an enclosure, along with the League’s constitution and list of officers, in UK TNA FCO 141/18185, piece 213. Besides Mulumba and Musazi, the officers were Chairman J. K.  Lamptey (Ghana), Vice-­Chairman J. H. Joof (Gambia), and Assistant Secretaries F. A. Forson (Ghana) and I. Okonkwo (Nigeria). 75.  UK TNA FCO 141/18185, piece 188 (a police spy report on the August 1949 African League rally at Trafalgar Square). 76.  The article from the Uganda Herald, August 18, 1949, is clipped and filed in UK TNA FCO 141/18185, piece 175. 77.  The DPRSW hit piece is found as an enclosure in UK TNA FCO 141/18185, piece 207, “Acting Director of Public Relations and Social Welfare to the Chief Secretary, October 1, 1949.” 78.  UK TNA FCO 141/18211, item 47, “Letter from Acting Governor to J.H. Wallace, Esq., Colonial Office, September 1, 1948.” 79.  UK TNA FCO 141/18405, “Top Secret: Report on My Visit to London, May 21, 1949 [by Uganda’s Acting Solicitor General].” The Uganda solicitor general believed the UK public prosecutor was less worried about losing a case on flimsy legal grounds and more concerned about the possibility that the charges would be seen as politically motivated (especially since at that moment the UK government was embroiled in controversy over whether it should extradite the Communist Gerhart Eisler to the United States). 80.  Matias Lule Ssonko, the editor of the Luganda paper Mugobansonga, received a three-­year prison sentence with hard labor for reporting on and quoting from a threatening

Notes    225 letter that had been sent from residents of Buddo to their Saza Chief. See the press clipping “Editor Sentenced to Three Years,” Uganda Herald, September 22, 1949, logged in Secretariat files covering the emergency, UK TNA FCO 141/18185, piece 204. 81.  UK TNA FCO 141/18212, “Letter from Mulumba to Mr. Pritt, April 10, 1949.” 82.  UK TNA FCO 141/18185, piece 177a, “[Commissioner of Police Special Branch] Note on Festo Kibuka Musoke,” 1949. After several failed searches of Musoke’s home, police received an anonymous tip about the hidden typewriter in the woods to which Musoke would go to type his seditious texts, though it appears they still were not able to turn up incriminating evidence of seditious writing. 83.  For discussion of Musoke’s brief detention, see UK TNA FCO 141/18185, piece 189, “Commissioner of Police (Special Branch) to Chief Secretary, September 7, 1949.”. 84.  Details of Lukabi’s arrest are found in UK TNA FCO 141/18185, piece 229, “Governor of Uganda to Secretary of State for the Colonies, May 25, 1950 [Savingram].”. 85.  UK TNA FCO 141/18185, piece 225a, “Brockway to Secretary of State for the Colonies [no date but forwarded to Uganda May 13, 1950].” 86.  Fenner Brockway, Outside the Right: A Sequel to “Inside the Left” (London: Allen and Unwin, 1963), 50. 87.  UK TNA CO 536/224/7, “Report on Uganda” [by Fenner Brockway], p. 7. 88.  “Report on Uganda” [by Fenner Brockway], p. 6. 89. Brockway, Outside the Right, 50. 90.  HC Deb, March 8, 1951, vol. 485, c917–c920. 91. Stonehouse acknowledged that it was fair to consider Cohen a Fabian, but he thought colonial civil servants’ criticisms of him as a “socialist” were not exactly right and that he would be better labeled a “progressive liberal.” See Stonehouse, Prohibited Immigrant, 57. 92.  Registration under the Business Names Ordinance simply announced to the public that groups affiliated with the organization were trading under the name of the Federation. It was a law typically used to register the name of a business partnership, but it gave no legal standing as a corporate entity and could not sue or be sued. For a discussion of the Federation’s standing under the law, see Uganda Protectorate, Commission of Inquiry into the Progress of the Co-­operative Movement in Mengo, Masaka and Busoga Districts (Entebbe: Government Printers, 1952), 2. 93.  It is exceedingly difficult to discern the real membership levels of the various registered and unregistered cooperative groups. First of all, membership fluctuated, especially as societies splintered in the years during and immediately after the emergency. It is also possible that officials and some leaders of independent groups may have looked for the best possible light in which to cast membership figures, since the question of legitimacy turned partly on which movement had the greatest support among Uganda’s farmers. For the 40,000-­member estimate for the Federation in 1951, see UK TNA CO 536/224/7, “J.W. Ross to B.J. Surridge, April 2, 1951.” A year later the Dreschfield Commission on the progress of the cooperative movement in Mengo, Masaka, and Busoga districts claimed that the state did indeed have just over 40,000 cooperators throughout Uganda. According to the commission, at the same time the Federation claimed 50,000 members throughout the Protectorate (greater than Ross’s earlier estimate but much lower than the 80,000 figure cited

226     Notes by Stonehouse); the splinter group from the Federation, Abalimi Limited (managed by Noakes), claimed 8,000 members, though all in Masaka district. Kabanda’s Uganda African Growers apparently claimed more than 22,000 members throughout Uganda, while the Uganda Farmers of Katwe (a “splinter group from the Uganda African Growers”) led by Danieri Kizito apparently claimed 80,000 members. The Dreschfield Commission’s report dismissed the membership claims of all but Abalimi, Ltd. as “exaggerated,” though the commission conceded that it was possible that there were nearly twice as many unregistered cooperative members as registered ones. See Uganda Protectorate, Commission of Inquiry into the Progress of the Co-­operative Movement, 4–5. 94. Stonehouse, Prohibited Immigrant, 46. 95.  SOAS PP MS 56/8, “Diane Noakes to Fenner Brockway, 24 July, 1951.” 96.  SOAS PP MS 56/26, “Diane Noakes’ CV.” Noakes stayed in Uganda until 1958 and worked first for the growers limited liability trading company she helped to start (Abalimi, Ltd.) and later as the executive secretary of the Central Council of the Indian Associations. She also chaired the Uganda Children’s Welfare Society. 97.  “Uganda’s Problems Solved (after Two Days in the Country),” Uganda Herald, August 28, 1952. I consulted a transcribed copy in UK TNA CO 822/420, piece 8. 98. Stonehouse, Prohibited Immigrant, 83–84. 99.  UK TNA CO 536/224/7, [Acting Cooperative Registrar] J. W. Ross to B. J. Surridge, April 2, 1951. 100.  For discussion of the growing reach of the Federation in 1951 see J. W. Ross to B. J. Surridge, April 2, 1951. 101. Shepherd, They Wait in Darkness, 243–244. 102.  Stonehouse described an extreme example of bullying that occurred at a meeting of farmers with an agent from the Cooperative Department. The meeting was outdoors on a hot day. Growing frustrated that the farmers were prolonging the meeting with many seemingly redundant questions, the officer got up, got into his car, and drove straight at the crowd, scattering the farmers. See Stonehouse, Prohibited Immigrant, 78–79. For further discussion of farmer complaints about bullying from the staff of the Cooperative Department, see Shepherd, They Wait in Darkness, 239. 103.  Salongo is quoted in Shepherd, They Wait in Darkness, 99–100. 104.  UK TNA CO 822/420, Minute by [Mr. Bates?] on Sir Andrew Cohen’s proposed changes to the Uganda Cooperative Law, July 25, 1952. 105.  Uganda Protectorate, Commission of Inquiry into the Progress of the Co-­operative Movement, 14. 106.  UK TNA CO 536/224/6, piece 3, “Note on Land Bank Project,” n.d. 107.  Uganda Protectorate, The Uganda Credit and Savings Bank Ordinance, 1950 (Entebbe: Government Printers, 1950). 108.  The model that Colonial Office advisers hoped Uganda would replicate was the rural credit bank, pioneered in Egypt starting in 1930 with the establishment of the Credit Agricole D’Egypte. That bank was jointly backed with funds from government and several commercial banks, but in the late 1940s it was restructuring so that cooperative societies themselves would eventually be co-­owners along with the state, and the bank’s lending would be almost exclusively to cooperatives. It seems, though, that so rushed were Ugandan officials to publicize a law establishing the bank that by the time the advice

Notes    227 on the Egyptian model arrived in Entebbe, officials there had already moved forward with the drafting of a law based on an earlier Trinidad law as its main model, which still enabled lending to cooperative societies. For Colonial Office discussion of the Uganda plan, including London officials’ hopes for an imitation of the Egyptian agricultural bank, see UK TNA CO 536/224/6, B. J. Surridge’s “Note on Proposed Land Bank and Building Society for Uganda.” 109.  UK TNA CO 536/224/6, “Note: Uganda Credit and Savings Banks Ordinance” (by K. W. Simmonds, Chief Secretary’s Office, Uganda Protectorate, October 26, 1950). 110. The 1952 Dreschfield Commission of Inquiry into the cooperative movement stated that “it was believed that . . . he prevented loans from be granted to [some] co-­ operative societies.” Uganda Protectorate, Commission of Inquiry into the Progress of the Co-­operative Movement, 11. 111.  In the end the Dreschfield Commission recommended that the Registrar should no longer be allowed on the bank’s board of directors, since “the Registrar should not be in a position to influence the bank against granting a loan because he thinks the granting of the loan is contrary to some co-­operative principle.” See Uganda Protectorate, Commission of Inquiry into the Progress of the Co-­operative Movement, 19. 112.  This is according to R. W. Newsam’s record of the conversation. TNA UK CO 536/224/7, Newsam’s minute of February 12, 1951. 113.  Brockway pointed especially to the onerous Clause 41 of the 1946 Cooperative Law, which allowed the Registrar to install his own manager to take over a society. He wrote in his report on his visit to Uganda: “This Clause would be more appropriate in a Corporate State than in a colony moving toward democracy.” See UK TNA CO 536/224/7, “Report on Uganda” [by Fenner Brockway], p. 4. 114.  Uganda Protectorate, Commission of Inquiry into the Progress of the Co-­operative Movement, 1. 115. Shepherd, They Wait in Darkness, 239. 116. Shepherd, They Wait in Darkness, 235. 117.  Uganda Protectorate, Commission of Inquiry into the Progress of the Co-­operative Movement, 15–17. 118.  UK TNA CO 822/420, piece 32, “Despatch No. 49052 [on the new Department of Community Development],” p. 4. 119.  Uganda Protectorate, Memorandum by the Government on the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Progress of the Co-­operative Movement in Mengo, Masaka, and Busoga Districts (Entebbe: Government Printers, 1952), 1. 120.  Memorandum by the Government on the Report of the Commission of Inquiry, 2. 121.  UK TNA CO 822/420, “Governor A. B. Cohen to P. Rogers [Colonial Office], July 15, 1952,” p. 4. 122.  UK TNA CO 822/420, “Cohen to T. Lloyd [Under-­Secretary of State for the Colonies], September 2, 1952,” p. 4. 123.  UK TNA CO 822/420, B. J. Surridge’s minute on Sir Andrew Cohen’s proposed changes to the Uganda Cooperative Law, August 1, 1952. 124.  UK TNA CO 822/420, piece 29, “Memo to Uganda Chief Secretary: The Co-­ operative Societies (Amendment) Bill, November 15, 1952” (enclosed in a letter from “Andrew Kerr to B. J. Surridge, November 15, 1952”), pp. 2–3.

228     Notes 125.  UK TNA CO 822/420, “J. Ross to B. J. Surridge, September 3, 1952.” 126. Shepherd, They Wait in Darkness, 251. 127. Stonehouse, Prohibited Immigrant, 76–77. 128.  The Cyprus law was introduced in 1914 and the Malaya law in 1922. 129.  The alliances Musazi formed in London were activated in service of Congress, and it is possible that in fact the idea for Congress was shaped in Musazi’s mind by his time in London and by his interactions there with Padmore, Brockway, and others of the anti-­ colonial Left, and perhaps most importantly Shepherd, who ended up moving to Uganda to help shape the logistics of the Federation’s cooperative activities as well as its political agitation. Apter, Political Kingdom, 310–314. 130. Apter, Political Kingdom, 312. 131. Apter, Political Kingdom, 330–335. 132.  Rawia Tawfik, “Egypt and the Transformations of the Pan-­African Movement: the Challenge of Adaptation,” African Studies 75, no. 3 (2016): 302–305. 133. Apter, Political Kingdom, 333–335. 134.  Crawford Young, Neal P. Sherman, and Tim H. Rose, Cooperatives and Development: Agricultural Politics in Ghana and Uganda (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 183–184. 135.  Young, Sherman, and Rose, Cooperatives and Development, 57–65. 136.  For discussion of Kenneth Kaunda’s socialist program, see Stephen A. Quick, Humanism or Technocracy? Zambia’s Farming Co-­operatives, 1965–1972 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press for the Institute for African Studies, University of Zambia, 1978). 137.  There has probably been more written on ujamaa than any other post-­colonial African socialist effort of development. See especially James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Leander Schneider, Government of Development: Peasants and Politicians in Postcolonial Tanzania (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014); and Priya Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 138.  Adom Getachew discusses ujamaa as part of anti-­colonial “worldmaking” to undo the world of European domination and build a world of nondomination. Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-­Determination. See especially chapter 5, “The Welfare World of the New International Economic Order,” which focuses on the political thought of Jamaica’s Michael Manley and Nyerere. 139.  Monique Bedasse, Jah Kingdom: Rastafarians, Tanzania, and Pan-­Africanism in the Age of Decolonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 49, 65. 140. Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania, 17. C HA P T E R 5 . C O O P E R AT I V E S A N D D E C O L O N I Z AT IO N I N P O ST WA R B R I TA I N

1.  As Adom Getachew writes in a recent study of anti-­colonial thought and political economy in an area encompassing the Black Atlantic world through Nyerere’s Tanzania, anti-­colonial thinkers and leaders were not solely interested in nation building but rather were taking part in “worldmaking.” They sought political, legal, and economic

Notes    229 institutions—often through ideas of federation—that would tie the domestic politics and economy of postcolonial states to a new international order based on justice and nondomination (constituted against the existing international order that had been created out of a long history of slavery and colonialism). Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-­Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 2–5. 2. The description of the Central African Federation as Britain’s “last great empire-­ building initiative” is from Bill Schwarz, The White Man’s World, vol. I of Memories of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 344. Schwarz includes an entire chapter on the Central African Federation and its collapse, emphasizing the reverberation of that history in the colonial metropole, shaping the politics of racial whiteness on the right in Britain. 3.  Priya Satia has shown, for instance, how British rule in the Middle East after World War I constituted a “covert empire” that went well beyond the paradigm of indirect rule to form a parallel state run by intelligence officers with real executive power. It was a form of rule that relied on secrecy—about, for instance, the routine use of bombing that could not discriminate between combatants and noncombatants—and was uniquely conditioned by the new age of mass participatory democracy in which anti-­imperial critique in Britain was growing; “covert empire” was rendered invisible to public scrutiny and sustained by officials who engaged in conversations about “how much they [the British public] knew, could know, should know—and why.” Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 7–8. For discussion of British official techniques of shaping news and information and combating exposure of British abuses by human rights activists in case studies of emergencies in Cyprus (1955–1959), Aden (1962–1967), and Northern Ireland (1969–1976), see Brian Drohan, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counter­insurgency at the End of the British Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017). 4.  For a thorough study of the legal and diplomatic maneuvering and the panic in the Colonial Office around the Convention, which Britain signed in 1950, see A. W. Brian Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 5.  Tim Harper describes the strategy of the New Villages as flowing from the criminalization of “the Chinese within the official mind”; the New Villages were the attempt by the British “to socialise and integrate what they saw as a ‘delinquent’ population, and to exorcise its tragic propensity towards political violence.” T. N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 168; see 149 for Harper’s discussion of food control and psychological warfare techniques and 183–186 for discussion of the Christian missions’ community development and welfare work (which included a variety of Protestant and Catholic missions). 6.  There is an extensive literature on Britain’s war against the Mau Mau Uprising. Significant recent studies are David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); and Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt, 2005). Aidan Forth has traced an earlier, multisited history of concentration camps used by the British during the nineteenth century. Aidan Forth, Barbed-­Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876–1903 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).

230     Notes 7.  Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire: 1939–1965 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 119–120. 8.  Saul Dubow, Apartheid: 1948–1994 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 50–51. 9. Dubow, Apartheid, 146–150. 10. Dubow, Apartheid, 50. 11.  Ryan M. Irwin, Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3–7. 12. Schwarz, The White Man’s World , 28–29. 13. Schwarz, The White Man’s World, 389. Joel Hebert’s recent dissertation places great emphasis on the longevity of the Rhodesian settler cause as part of the political culture of British conservatism into the Thatcher era of the early 1980s, complicating any neat bracketing-­off of decolonization as something over by the end of the 1960s. Joel Hebert, “The Sun Never Sets: Rethinking the Politics of Late British Decolonization, 1968 to the Present” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 2019). 14.  Kennetta Hammond Perry, London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship, and the Politics of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 23. 15.  As Jordanna Bailkin observes, in their attempts to define and manage migration and recommend policy, experts drew on British colonial anthropology and in particular (since many migration experts had been trained as anthropologists of Africa) the fieldwork insights on the capacity for African communities to “adapt” to culture change and the usefulness of community development. Bailkin, The Afterlife of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 23–30. The explosion of sociology in postwar Britain itself owed much to the colonial foundations of social anthropology, which between the wars had focused so much attention on the research problematic of communities in rapidly changing “traditional” societies in Africa and elsewhere. Numerous professors in the increasingly requisite sociology departments in British universities had previously conducted research in the empire. See George Steinmetz, “A Child of the Empire: British Sociology and Colonialism, 1940s–1960s,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 49, no. 4 (Autumn 2013): 353–378. In Britain, community studies and community development increasingly became organizing frameworks to think about and resolve (real and imagined) crises of social change across British society in the 1960s and 1970s, a linchpin of social welfarism and social work, and—as Lise Butler argues—an important part of the postwar turn to social science made by Left thinkers devoted to communitarian visions of socialism. For a recent study that recognizes the colonial anchoring of community development and thinks through some of its aspirations and paternalist limitations in liberal-­progressive engagements with it and the important implications of its emergence in the context of decolonization and intensifying racism against Commonwealth migrants, see Camilla Schofield and Ben Jones, “ ‘Whatever Community Is, This Is Not It’: Notting Hill and the Reconstruction of ‘Race’ in Britain after 1958,” Journal of British Studies 58, no. 1 (2019): 142–173. See also Lise Butler, Michael Young, Social Science and the British Left, 1945–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Radhika Natarajan, “Organizing Community: Commonwealth Citizens and Social Activism in Britain, 1948–1982” (PhD diss., University of California, 2013); and Jon Lawrence, Me, Me, Me?: The Search for Community in Post-war England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

Notes    231 16. Perry, London Is the Place for Me, 119. 17. Perry, London Is the Place for Me, 92. 18.  James H. Hudson, foreword to Daybreak in the Colonies (London: Cooperative Union, 1954), 1–2. 19.  Proceedings of the Cooperative Party Annual Conference held in Bridlington, Easter, 1959 (Manchester, UK: Co-­operative Union, 1959), 38–41, Bishopsgate Institute Cooperative Movement Collection. The resolution had been brought by the Scottish Ayrshire Federation but then amended and moved by London. 20.  Peter Gurney, Co-­operative Culture and the Politics of Consumption in England, 1870–1930 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996), 107–110. 21.  Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Prince­ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 22.  Co-­operative Party, The Annual Report Prepared by the National Committee of the Co-­operative Party for Presentation to the Annual National Conference of the Co-­operative Party to Be Held at York on 28th and 29th January, 1928 (Manchester, UK: Co-­operative Union, 1927), 14–15. 23. The Co-­ operative Union Limited, General Co-­ operative Survey: Third Interim Report, as presented to the Liverpool Co-­operative Congress, 1918 (Manchester, UK: Co-­ operative Printing Society, 1919), 47. 24.  Lander was speaking to the Coventry Perseverance Society. Quoted in Gurney, Co-­ operative Culture, 205; see also 96 for Lander’s vision for international cooperation, which he thought could be best practically achieved through federated cooperative wholesalers. 25. Gurney, Co-­operative Culture, 108–109. 26.  John F. Wilson, Anthony Webster, and Rachael Vorberg-­Rugh, Building Co-­ Operation: A Business History of The Co-­operative Group, 1863–2013 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 130–133. 27.  Wilson, Webster, and Vorberg-­Rugh, Building Co-­Operation, 130–133. 28.  Erika Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 150, for the figure on the co-­op’s plantation acreage in India and Ceylon; 239 for the figure on the co-­op’s market share in Britain; and 247 for discussion of the CWS empire brand in the context of interwar Drink Empire Tea campaigns. 29.  Synopses and brief discussion of Rose of the Orient (M. F. Cooper and George Wynn, dir., Publicity Films, Ltd., 1931; sound, 40 min.) and other imperial-­commodity cooperative films can be found in Alan Burton, The British Co-­operative Movement Film Catalogue (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997). See 15–16 for discussion of the original 1931 Rose of the Orient; and 23–24 for the second, 5 min. 40 sec. version. An earlier imperial-­ commodity film that did not feature on-­location shots of the CWS plantations was The Cup That Cheers (Publicity Films, 1928, silent, 5 min. 52 sec.). It depicted historical scenes of tea consumption starting in China during an earlier century, then passing through Elizabethan England and Victorian Britain, before showing scenes of CWS tea arriving at the Leman Street warehouse and tea drinking in a British home. See Burton, The British Cooperative Movement Film Catalogue, 7. 30. Burton, The British Cooperative Movement Film Catalogue, 15–16. Erika Rappaport remarks that perhaps better than any other form, tea advertising, including with film, fits

232     Notes what Marx called commodity fetishism: the ability of the commodity to represent itself while erasing the labor involved in its production. Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire, 271. Rose of the Orient shows that even when the lens was on plantation work, it was made to look like not work but leisure: singing, dancing, etc. 31.  Co-­op managers tried to secure higher dividend payouts to their members by suppressing wages for their own workers, a fact for which they were castigated in trade union publications. Managers also would operate the stores on Saturdays as a convenience for members even when workers complained about their longer work week. Nicole Robertson, The Co-­operative Movement and Communities in Britain, 1914–1960: Minding Their Own Business (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 194, 207. 32.  The earliest I have found the issue raised in the political spaces of the British cooperative movement was in 1952, when a motion was discussed at the annual meeting of the London Cooperative Party to call on the LCS Political Committee to convene a conference with an authoritative speaker on the subject of CWS plantations and their management. See agenda item 13 in the “Final Agenda of the Twenty-­Sixth Annual Conference of the London Cooperative Party, Bethnal Green, November 22-­23, 1952” (Bishopsgate Institute Cooperative Movement Collection). 33.  Peddie was responding to an LCS member who expressed frustration that in the fifteen months since the issue of working conditions on CWS tea plantations was raised at the 1952 London Co-­op Party meeting, there still had not been an event with an authoritative speaker from the CWS on the issue. BICMC LCS A/2E/3, “Report of a Special Conference Organised by the Political Committee of the London-­Co-­operative Society in Conjunction with A.S.S.E.T, at the Assembly Room, Central Hall, Westminster, on Saturday, February 6t[h], 1954, to Discuss ‘The Place of the Co-­operative Movement in Future Society,’ ” pp. 21–­22. 34.  Mathew Anderson, “ ‘Cost of a Cup of Tea’: Fair Trade and the British Cooperative Movement, c. 1960–2000,” in Consumerism and the Co-­operative Movement in Modern British History: Taking Stock, ed. Lawrence Black and Nicole Robertson (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009). The episode “Cost of a Cup of Tea” aired in 1973 on Granada TV’s World in Action program. It depicted a miserable situation for ­workers and families on the estates that included inferior housing, rampant hookworm and malnutrition, and high child mortality. When compared to capitalist-­owned plantations, the CWS’s Mahouvilla estate was deemed as bad and in some measures—such as ­housing—“ ‘­marginally worse.’ ” As Anderson observes, many cooperators were shocked by the revelations, and some got involved in campaigns for fair wages for tea pickers. The story was covered in Co-­operative News, in which one cooperative member was quoted decrying the “ ‘slave conditions we expect from capitalism and private enterprise’ ” and arguing that “ ‘to see them linked with the co-­operative movement is something which just cannot be left without violent protest.’ ” Despite the outcry from members, it was not until the 1980s that the CWS took on fair trade concepts in supply chains and marketing. See Anderson, “ ‘The Cost of a Cup of Tea,’ ” 241–244. 35.  The cooperator quoted here was Mr. W. Stephens of Battersea South. BICMC, [Proceedings of the] 28th Annual Conference of the London Co-­operative Party, 20–21 November, 1954 p. 118.

Notes    233 36.  Daybreak in Udi (Ministry of Information/Crown Film Unit, 1949) was shown in theaters in Britain as well as in mobile cinema shows in Africa. For discussion of the film, including detailed coverage of Edward Chadwick’s colonial career and his influence on community development in Nigeria and British Cameroon, see Ben Page, “ ‘And the Oscar Goes to . . . Daybreak in Udi’: Understanding Late Colonial Community Development and Its Legacy through Film,” Development and Change 45, no. 5 (2014): 838–868; see. 840 for mention of the film’s showing in Britain and, via mobile cinema, in Africa. 37.  Bishop had previously worked on short war-­effort films that were notable for their close focus on the work processes of working class communities on the home front. Daybreak in Udi was Bishop’s greatest success to date, winning an Oscar for Best Documentary in 1950 (though the film used actors to recreate the events told by Chadwick). 38.  Chadwick is mentioned in the colonial record as one of the Nigerian government’s officers seconded for cooperative work; see Mr. Creasy’s minute of Feb[ruary] 5, 1934. in UK TNA CO 554/93/9. Chadwick was in fact the bearer of the bad news to the Colonial Office that Strickland had to be sent home to England with dysentery, cutting short his West Africa tour. 39.  James H. Hudson (Co-­operative Parliamentary Group Steering Committee), foreword to Daybreak in the Colonies (London: Cooperative Union, 1954), 1–2. A copy of the pamphlet is in BICMC Pamphlets, box 21, CMP 897. 40.  Cooperative development publicity thus was guilty of the same reduced view of development as that commonly held by government officials. As Frederick Cooper sums up development discourse among postwar French and British officials, “Development was something to be done to and for Africa, not with it.” Frederick Cooper, “Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept,” in International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, ed. Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 65. 41.  UK TNA CO 852/1361/2, Annual Report of the Registrar of Cooperative Societies in Nigeria for the Year Ending 31st March, 1950 (Lagos: Government Printers, 1951), 14. 42.  An example is Secretary of State for the Colonies Lennox-­Boyd in 1955 answering questions in Parliament on the reported understaffing of the East African Co-­operative Training College, which had grown out of the Jeanes school in Kabete, Kenya. Lennox-­ Boyd claimed to be “always anxious that this college should be a success” and that his “door was always open” to the cooperative movement. HC Deb, April 6, 1955, vol. 539, c1172. 43.  Daybreak in the Colonies (Cooperative Union on behalf of the Cooperative Party, 1954), 12. BICMC Pamphlets, box 21, CMP 897. 44.  Sarah Stockwell, The British End of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 96. Chapter 3 of Stockwell’s book treats the Oxford and Cambridge programs in detail. 45.  Institutional connections between British colonial cooperative development and the cooperative movement in Britain are documented in Rita Rhodes, Empire and Co-­ operation: How the British Empire Used Co-­operatives in its Development Strategies, 1900– 1970 (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2012). Rhodes includes discussion of Cooperative College and notes how the colonial program there brought together two traditions of cooperation, “one

234     Notes voluntary the other imperial,” as well as how the program generated interest in colonial cooperation among cooperators in Britain. See 245–251. 46.  UK TNA CO 852/1360/3, Surridge’s minute, June 14, 1950. 47.  UK TNA CO 852/1360/4, “BJ Surridge to G.C.G. Adams, May 26, 1952.” 48.  UK TNA CO 852/1360/3, “Letter from R. L. Marshall, Principal, The Cooperative College to B. J. Surridge, Colonial Office, 14 June 1950.” 49.  UK TNA CO 852/1360/2, “Co-­operative College Fifth Colonial Course—October 1951–1952.” 50.  BICMC, “London Co-­operative Party Report of the 33rd Annual Conference on Saturday and Sunday, November 21 and 22, 1959,” pp. 26–30. 51.  I say limited circulation, but I have not seen the sales figures for 1954, the year Daybreak in the Colonies was published. However, during the following year the Cooperative Party sold only 511 copies of the sixpence pamphlet. BICMC, “Report of the National Committee of the Co-­operative Party for 1955.” 52.  The Victoria Federation was led by Paul Bomani, who became an influential figure in the major independence party, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU). By 1959 the Federation was purchasing almost the entire cotton crop and “could boast a turnover which was probably greater than that of any other non-­government African-­ owned business on the continent.” Andrew Coulson, Tanzania: A Political Economy, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2013), 97–99. 53. Beatrice Webb and Sidney Webb, A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain (London: Longmans, Green, 1920), xiv–xvii. 54.  Proceedings of the Co-­operative Party Annual Conference, Weston-­super-­Mare, Easter, 1961 (Manchester, UK: Cooperative Union, 1961), 55. 55.  BICMC LCS A/2E/3, “Report of a Special Conference Organised by the Political Committee of the London-­Co-­operative Society,” p. 19. 56.  Green was speaking in support of the motion to ask the LCS to explore ways to build on the prescriptions of Daybreak in the Colonies. BICMC, [Proceedings of the] 28th Annual Conference of the London Co-­operative Party, 20-­21 November, 1954, p. 117. 57.  BICMC, “London Co-­operative Party Report of the 33rd Annual Conference on Saturday and Sunday, November 21 and 22, 1959,” pp. 22-­24. . 58.  Daybreak in the Colonies, 1. BICMC Pamphlets, box 21, CMP 897. 59. Dubow, Apartheid, 68–73. 60.  Proceedings of the Co-­operative Party Annual Conference Held in Skegness, Easter, 1957 (Manchester, UK: Cooperative Union, 1957), 34–35. 61.  Proceedings of the Co-­operative Party Annual Conference, 1961, 54. Roberta Bivins spots Smitherman writing a letter several years earlier, in 1955, to the minister of health in her capacity as secretary of the Women’s Cooperative Guild of Perry Barr (Birmingham), wherein she connected race and living standards in a way that rhetorically linked immigrants to public health threats in the city, including TB—though she claimed her organization did not seek a “ ‘colour bar.’ ” As Bivins writes, “Smitherman’s rejection of a ‘colour bar’ and her efforts to forestall accusations of racism represent one of the most common tropes in letters from the public about immigrant health in the 1950s.” Roberta Bivins, Contagious Communities: Medicine, Migration, and the NHS in Post War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 62–63.

Notes    235 62. Brockway’s “Third Force” perspective on postcolonial political and economic development lined up with the views of many of the other European delegates at the 1948 Puteaux conference, who saw the Soviet Union as an adversary to socialism. This generated debate at the conference—as well as a rewrite of the conference’s political report in order to eliminate Third Force language—because many of the Asian and African delegates saw the Soviet Union as more an ally in than a threat to anti-­colonial struggles and did not want to associate themselves with condemnation of the USSR. See Anne-­Isabelle Richard, “The Limits of Solidarity: Europeanism, Anticolonialism and Socialism at the Congress of Peoples of Europe, Asia, and Africa in Puteaux, 1948,” European Review of History 21, no. 4 (2014): 519–537, esp. 529–531. 63.  HC Deb, November 21, 1952, vol. 507, c2289. The context was a debate on amendments to the Colonial Loans Act. 64.  HC Deb, November 21, 1952, vol. 507, c2290. 65.  For example, after the first Congress of Peoples in Puteaux (Paris) in 1948, the delegation from Britain and countries in the British empire demanded in a resolution “comprehensive agrarian reform” and lamented “a grave lack of mechanical aids, scientific agriculture and co-­operative organization (credit, marketing and cultivation)” in colonial territories. See UK TNA CO 537/4383, “Joint Declaration by Delegates from Britain and from Countries in the British Empire,” n.d. 66.  Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire, 1918–1964 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 233. 67.  Christabel Gurney, “ ‘A Great Cause’: The Origins of the Anti-­Apartheid Movement, June 1959–March 1960,” Journal of Southern African Studies 26, no. 1 (2000): 129. 68.  At meetings of organizations they had targeted for membership drives, MCF activists were encouraged to leave copies of the membership form, a piece of paper printed on both sides that contained the group’s manifesto along with information about how to join and how to sign up to receive its publication, Colonial Freedom News. SOAS MCF/AC/59, MCF Membership Form (undated, but from 1960–1969). 69.  SOAS MCF/AC/01, MCF London and Home Counties Executive Committee minutes, December 10, 1957. 70.  BICMC, “Report of the Proceeding at the 35th Annual Conference of the London Co-­operative Party, Nov[ember] 18–19, 1961,” pp. 38–41. 71.  A list of topics addressed at a meeting attended by LCS activists in 1957 includes the problems of racial discrimination in Britain, the ongoing Cyprus Emergency, official efforts to purge “known subversives” from the upcoming Singapore elections, and much discussion of the government’s plans for the Central African Union. MCF/AC/2, London Area Council meeting minutes, May 21, 1957. 72.  At a meeting of the London Area Council of the MCF in 1957, there were nine delegates representing various London-­area cooperatives, Co-­op Party branches, and ­Women’s Cooperative Guild branches. See SOAS MCF/AC/2, Minutes of Area Council Meeting, November 12, 1957. 73.  SOAS MCF/AC/2, Chairman’s report for February 27 to May 21, 1957. 74.  An accounting in June 1960 had it that eighty-­five of the ninety-­one recent meetings in the London area involving the MCF’s Speakers Service were on the subject of Africa. MCF/AC/2, London Area Council meeting minutes for June 30, 1960.

236     Notes 75.  SOAS MCF/AC/2, Secretary’s report in MCF London Area Council meeting minutes, May 21, 1957. 76.  For instance, at an MCF meeting in 1963, members were urged to attend their quarterly co-­op meetings “in order to support the demand for a complete ban on sale of all S. African goods” by the London Cooperative Society. SOAS MCF/AC/01, MCF London and Home Counties Executive Committee minutes, November 11, 1963. 77. BICMC, “Report of the Twenty-­Sixth Annual Conference of the London Co-­ operative Party, Held November 22nd and 23rd, 1952 at the York Hall, Bethnal Green,” 13. 78.  Discussion of the actions taken in the Central African Federation protest are discussed in the LCS political committee report from 1953. BICMC, “Report of the Political Committee to the Twenty-­Seventh Annual Conference of the London Co-­operative Party, 21–22 November, 1953,” 9. 79.  SOAS MCF/AC 2, MCF London Area Council meeting minutes, July 21, 1959. 80. Dubow, Apartheid, 40–43. 81.  Holly Y. McGee, Radical Antiapartheid Internationalism and Exile: The Life of Elizabeth Mafeking (New York: Routledge, 2019), 42–45. 82. McGee, Radical Antiapartheid Internationalism and Exile, 59–63. 83. McGee, Radical Antiapartheid Internationalism and Exile, 82. 84.  MCF/AC/02, MCF London and Home Counties Central Council minutes, October 26, 1961. 85.  Roger Fieldhouse, Anti-­Apartheid: A History of the Movement in Britain; A Study in Pressure Group Politics (London: Merlin Press, 2005), 35. 86.  Gurney, “ ‘A Great Cause,’ ” 140. 87. Dubow, Apartheid, 74. 88.  On the media event, Håkan Thörn observes that events in South Africa could only ever become catalysts for action in Britain and elsewhere because of the careful work by activists in South Africa to organize their mediation. Even atrocities like police massacres did not by themselves shock publics into moral outrage. Instead, activists in South Africa worked to prepare media and influence reporting there and then deployed their international networks to force the event into the public eye and shape its viewing, interpret it, and direct moral outrage to specific calls to action. See Håkan Thörn, Anti-­Apartheid and the Emergence of a Global Civil Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 15–18. According to Thörn, some of the most significant “events”—the mediation of which activists sought to structure—were the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, protests against the South Africa cricket team when it toured Britain in 1970, Soweto, the shootings in Langa on the twenty-­fifth anniversary of Sharpeville in 1985, and Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. 89.  “A Colour Bar at a Co-­op?,” Daily Mirror, July 4, 1960. 90.  “A Colour Bar at a Co-­op?” 91.  SOAS MCF/AC/01, MCF London and Home Counties Executive Committee minutes, July 4, 1960. 92.  BICMC LCS A/1A/22, Minutes of meeting of the Committee of Management, July 7, 1960. 93.  “No Co-­op Colour Bar,” Hampstead News, August 5, 1960. 94.  “Co-­op Colour Bar Talk Is Deplorable, Says JP,” Romford Recorder, July 29, 1960.

Notes    237 95.  “Colour Bar? Blame the Customers,” Wood Green Weekly Herald, July 8, 1960. 96.  “Colour Bar? Blame the Customers.” 97.  “Co-­op Colour Bar Talk Is Deplorable, Says JP.” G. F. Dutch, in his statement at the LCS members meeting, pointed to the fund as a piece of evidence showing that it was “inconceivable” that there was a color bar. 98.  “ ‘Ban on Indian’ to be Investigated,” Daily Worker, July 5, 1960. 99.  The proworker element in cooperative culture and branding was not new. Members of cooperatives in Britain often saw themselves as working hand in hand with the labor movement in Britain for the benefit of workers against capitalism. Publicists for cooperation tried to link the movement with the cause of labor, presenting the argument that cooperatives and trade unions were “two halves of the same circle.” Robertson, The Co-­operative Movement and Communities in Britain, 197. 100.  Elaine Dean, “My Story: How Co-­operators Led a South African Boycott in Support of Mandela,” Co-­op News, December 12, 2013, www.thenews.coop/40332/sector/ my-­story-­how-­co-­operators-­led-­south-­african-­boycott-­support-­mandela/. 101. Thörn, Anti-­Apartheid and the Emergence of a Global Civil Society, 130–131. 102.  “Co-­op Is Selling ‘Banned’ South African Goods,” Brentford and Chiswick Times, December 9, 1960. 103.  BICMC, “34th Annual Conference of the London Co-­operative Party, 19th and 20th November, 1960,” p. 76. 104.  “34th Annual Conference of the London Co-­operative Party,” p. 80. 105.  Gurney, “ ‘A Great Cause,’ ” 144. 106.  The question of what made some organizations in Britain decide to ally with AAM is being explored right now in a major project by Simon Stevens. As Stevens has written, the domestic political agendas of individuals and groups that AAM sought to mobilize mattered greatly when it came to the extent and tempo of their activism, such that anti-­ apartheid activism at times followed “distinctly national rhythms.” Groups as different in ideological outlook as the Revolutionary Communist Group and the Young Liberals could both see anti-­apartheid activism not only as a means to transform South Africa but also a cause that could help remake the economic and political order in Britain according to their ideals. See Simon Stevens, “Why South Africa? The Politics of Anti-­Apartheid Activism in Britain in the Long 1970s,” in The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s, ed. Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 223. The twists and turns of British party politics also could put ideological alignments in the back seat altogether behind seemingly unrelated matters of political expediency. The decision of the Labour Party to endorse the March 1960 Month of Boycott is a good example. As Christabel Gurney notes, the Labour Party endorsed the boycott movement early on in 1960— albeit in a limited way—in part because Labour had unexpectedly lost the election the year before. Needing a unifying cause to mend rifts, the party decided to “ ‘make a moral appeal to the country’ ” by naming 1960 Africa Year. The party then “stumbled into supporting the boycott as a ready-­made campaign” for Africa Year. See Gurney, “ ‘A Great Cause,’ ” 136. 107. Fieldhouse, Anti-­Apartheid, 70–72. For further discussion of the CWS’s anti-­ apartheid decision, see Wilson, Webster, and Vorberg-­Rugh, Building Co-­operation, 323. For a brief but wide-­ranging discussion of the difficulties faced by activists who wanted to

238     Notes push for fair trade practices and advance other justice causes, including the South African boycott, see Anderson, “ ‘Cost of a Cup of Tea,’ ” 240–259. C O N C LU SIO N

1.  Annual Report on the Working of [Punjab] Co-­operative Societies for the Year 1906, 8, British Library, India Office Records, IOR V/24/595. 2.  C. F. Strickland, “The Cooperative Movement in the East,” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1931–1939) 11, no. 6 (1932): 813. 3.  T. G. Benson, “The Jeanes School and the Education of the East African Native,” Journal of the Royal African Society 35, no. 141 (October 1936): 419. 4.  A New Life: Squatter Resettlement (Malayan Film Unit, 1951). 5.  John Stonehouse, Prohibited Immigrant (London: The Bodley Head, 1960), 52–53. 6.  Ken Loach, dir., The Spirit of ’45 (Sixteen Films/Fly Film Company, 2013).

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Bibliography    251 Latham, G. C., and Leslie A. Notcutt. The African and the Cinema. London: Edinburgh House Press, 1937. Louwes, H. J. Use of the Revolving Capital Plan by Co-­operative Associations. Rome: FAO, 1951. Lugard, Frederick. The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. London: Blackwood, 1922. McKee, William J. “Examples of the Work of Christian Missions in Rural Areas.” In ­International Missionary Council, The Christian Mission in Relation to Rural Problems: Report of the Jerusalem Meeting of the International Missionary Council, March 24th–April 8th, 1928, 32–87. London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1928. Mill, John Stuart. A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation. Vol. 2. London: John W. Parker, 1843. Oliver, Richard A. C. “Mental Tests in the Study of the African.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 7, no. 1 (1934): 40–46. Owen, Robert. A New View of Society; or, Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character and the Application of the Principle to Practice. London: Richard and Arthur Taylor, 1813. Padmore, George. Africa: Britain’s Third Empire. London: Dennis Dobson, 1949. ———. “The Bataka Movement in Uganda.” The Crisis, January 1950. Proceedings of the Co-­operative Party Annual Conference Held in Skegness, Easter, 1957. Manchester, UK: Cooperative Union, 1957. Proceedings of the Co-­operative Party Annual Conference, Weston-­super-­Mare, Easter, 1961. Manchester, UK: Cooperative Union, 1961. Report of the Department of Community Development for the Six Months 1st January, 1959 to 30 June, 1959. Entebbe: Government Printers, 1959. Schiller, Otto. Individual Farming on Co-­operative Lines. Lahore: Punjab Cooperative Union, 1956. Shepherd, George. They Wait in Darkness. New York: John Day Company, 1955. “Statement Adopted by the Council: The Christian Mission in Relation to Rural Problems in Asia and Africa.” In The Christian Mission in Relation to Social Problems: Report of the Jerusalem Meeting of the International Missionary Council, March 24–April 8, 1928. London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1928. Stonehouse, John. Prohibited Immigrant. London: The Bodley Head, 1960. Strickland, C. F. Co-­operation for Africa. London: Oxford University Press, 1933. ———. “Co-­operation for Africa.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 6, no. 1 (January 1933): 15–26. ———. “The Cooperative Movement in the East.” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1931–1939) 11, no. 6 (November 1932): 812–832. ———. “The Co-­operative Society as an Instrument of Economic and Social Construction.” Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics 8, no. 1 (January 1942): 95–116. ———. “Supplement: The Co-­Operative Movement in Africa.” Journal of the Royal African Society 34, no. 134 (January 1935): 1–18.

252     Bibliography Strickland, Claude Francis. “Co-­operation and the Schoolmaster.” Oversea Education: A Journal of Educational Experiment and Research in Tropical and Subtropical Areas 1, no. 4 (July 1930): 119–125. ———. “Rural Reconstruction.” Oversea Education 4, no. 3 (1933): 112. ———. “The Struggle for Land in Palestine.” Current History 34, no. 1 (April 1, 1931): 45–49. Surridge, B. J., and Margaret Digby. A Manual of Cooperative Law and Practice. Cambridge, UK: W. Heffer and Sons, 1948. Uganda Protectorate. Annual Report of the Department of Community Development for the Year Ended 31 December, 1952. Entebbe: Government Printers, 1952. ———. Commission of Inquiry into the Progress of the Co-­operative Movement in Mengo, Masaka and Busoga Districts (aka the Dreschfield Commission Report). Entebbe: Government Printers, 1952. ———. A Development Plan for Uganda [by E. B. Worthington with a Preface by Governor J. Hathorn Hall]. Entebbe: Government Printers, 1947. ———. Memorandum by the Government on the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Progress of the Co-­operative Movement in Mengo, Masaka, and Busoga Districts. Entebbe: Government Printers, 1952. ———. Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Disturbances in Uganda during April, 1949 (aka The Kingdon Report). Entebbe: Government Printers, 1950. ———. The Uganda Credit and Savings Bank Ordinance, 1950. Entebbe: Government ­Printers, 1950. United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture, Hot Springs, Virginia, May 18–June 3, 1943: Final Act and Section Reports. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1943. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Co-­operative Thrift, Credit and Marketing in Economically Under-­Developed Countries. Rome: FAO, 1953. ———. Rural Progress through Co-­operatives: The Place of Co-­operative Associations in Agricultural Development. New York: UN Economic Affairs and FAO, 1954. Village Education in Africa: Report of the Inter-­Territorial Jeanes Conference, Salisbury, S. Rhodesia, May 27th-­June 6th, 1933. Lovedale, South Africa: Lovedale Press, 1935. Webb, Beatrice. The Co-­Operative Movement in Great Britain. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1891. Webb, Beatrice, and Sidney Webb. A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain. London: Longmans, Green, 1920. ———. Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? London: Longmans, 1935. World Missionary Conference. Report of Commission III: Education in Relation to the Christianisation of National Life. Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson, and Ferrier, 1910. ARCHIVES

Bishopsgate Institute—Cooperative Movement Collection (BICMC) London Cooperative Society records (especially of the LCS Political Committee) Cooperative Party Conference Proceedings (London and national party conferences) Cooperative Movement pamphlets

Bibliography    253 British Library, India Office Records (IOR) Punjab Cooperative Department reports Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary Village Teachers’ Journal (publication of the Moga School, Punjab) Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library Carnegie Corporation (CCNY) files on the Jeanes Schools, the Bantu Educational ­Kinema Experiment, J. H. Oldham, C. F. Strickland’s West Africa study Kenya National Archives (KNA) Provincial commissioner’s records, Nyanza Province League of Nations Archives (LON) Permanent Mandates Commission reports and proceedings Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) Records of the Moga School, Punjab SOAS Diane Noakes collection Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF) collection UK National Archives (UK TNA) Colonial Office (CO) files Ministry of Information (INF) files Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) files UK Parliamentary Record (Hansard) House of Commons Debates (HC Deb) Weston Library, Bodleian, Commonwealth and African Collections, formerly housed at Rhodes House (RH) Library (now Weston Library, Oxford) Jeanes School, Kabete, Kenya files Alexander Cavendish papers (Cooperative Department, Malaya) Leonard Gammans papers (Cooperative Department, Malaya) Yale Divinity Library International Missionary Council (IMC) records Zanzibar National Archives (ZNA) Secretariat files Clove Growers Association files

Inde x

adapted education, 13–14, 62, 83, 89, 100, 177, 189n33; Christian missionaries framing cooperatives as part of, 63, 70–72; and Jeanes schools, 73–76; and the 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary ­Conference, 64 Advisory Committee on Cooperation in the Colonies, 6, 99–100, 109 Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies (ACEC): Jeanes system, 73; mass education, 86–88, 93, 210n111; 1925 White Paper on adapted education for Africa, 83 African League, 125–26, 221n38 African National Congress (ANC), 159; boycott and sanctions strategy, 166–67. See also Anti-­Apartheid Movement (AAM) anthropology, 11; and the crisis of culture change in Africa, 12–13, 20; and Davis, the International Missionary Council, and the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment, 89; and “race relations” research and community studies in postwar Britain, 146, 230n15; shaping indirect rule in India, 7–8 Anti-­Apartheid Movement (AAM), 17, 142, 144–45, 147, 237n106; and Cooperative College, 159–60; and the Month of Boycott, 167–68, 170fig., 171fig., 172–73; organizing within the British cooperative movement, 161–62, 165–66, 174

arbitration societies, 27 Asser, Ephraim, 53 Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment (BEKE), 66, 88–93, 178 Bataka Union, 95, 110–11, 114–15, 137; and 1949 “disturbances” and emergency, 118–29 Benson, T. G., 78–80, 85, 177 better living societies, 32 Bhanabhai, Ramanlal, 167–69, 171–72 Bomani, Paul 159, 234n52 Bowman, Ernest, 74 Brayne, Frank Lugard, 29, 67, 69, 193n12, 205n31 British Cameroon, 9, 30 Brockway, Fenner, 96, 130–31, 134, 137; advocacy in UK on behalf of Musazi and UAFU, 125–27, 223n65; criticisms of the cooperative movement of colonial state planning, 124, 227n13; friendship with Musazi, 124, 129; and postwar British Left’s hopes for cooperative development in Africa, 161–62, 235n62; visit to Uganda, 128 Butterfield, Kenyon, 64–66, 71, 74, 203n12, 204n16 Cameron, Donald, 12, 58–59, 202n156 capitalism, 4, 15; British cooperative m ­ ovement’s long history of working within, 6–7; colonial cooperation as safeguard of capitals’ “fair share” of profits, 28; colonial estate laborers’ thrift societies as potential

255

256     Index capitalism (continued) boon to capitalist estate owners (Malaya), 32; community character calculable for capital (in Punjab ICS colonial cooperative ideology), 27; Cooperative Wholesale Society’s working conditions in Sri Lanka compared to capitalist tea estates, 150–51, 232nn32,33,34; rescuing colonial capitalism with cooperative rule, 28–29; and the transformation of the Indian Ocean world, 10; Webbs on co-­op democracy gradually overcoming capitalism in ­Britain, 157, 192n43 Carnegie Corporation, 14, 30, 59, 61–62, 71; and the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment, 88; and Jeanes schools, 73, 83–84; sponsorship of Strickland’s West Africa tour, 30, 59 Cavendish, Alexander, 108 Central African Federation, 143, 165 Ceylon (Sri Lanka), 150–51, 232nn32,33,34 Chadwick, Edward, 152 character: in ICS cooperative development and rural reconstruction, 8–9, 25–27; as measurable and trainable via cooperative societies, 25; in missionary community development project lessons, 67–70, 78, 80; in Owenism, 4, 8; thrift as trainable trait, 10, 26, 31–33, 59 Christian socialism, 66, 204n22 Clove Growers Association, 40, 42–45, 198n98 Cohen, Andrew, 95, 129, 131, 139; reform of Uganda’s cooperative law and abolition of the office of the Registrar, 134–37 Coldrick, W., 157–58 communism: anti-­communism and Cold War calculations in Britain’s support for apartheid South Africa, 144–45; anti-­communism and emergency rule, 17, 108–10; appeal of Soviet rural development concepts within anti-­colonial movements, 95, 235n62; Soviet model of rural modernization in view of British colonial developers, 28–29, 92–93, 104, 212n150; the Webbs’ admiration for Soviet accomplishments, 186n16 community development, 1, 7–8, 12, 14; and community studies in postwar Britain, 146, 230n15; cooperatives as part of, 1, 18, 176; cooperatives as spaces of group formation and decision making, 15, 27, 100, 138; in Daybreak in Udi, 152–53;

discussed at international missionary conferences, 63–67; in the language of postcolonial development, 140; missionary education and rural reconstruction projects, 12–13, 67–73; in Uganda’s postwar development plan, 102. See also development groups; spectacle of community development Congress of Peoples Against Imperialism, 96, 124, 130 Cooperative College (UK), 154–57; and anti-­apartheid, 159–60 Cooperative Commonwealth, 6, 149, 159, 169, 186n16 Cooperative Congress (UK), 149 cooperative department: centrality in postwar Colonial Office development plans, 99–100; and the colonial training program at Cooperative College, 155; Cyprus, 109; Malaya, 31–33; melding with emergency rule, 107, 109; as new rural agency, 14–15; in postcolonial African states, 140; Punjab, 2, 9, 19, 21–22, 26, 29; Strickland and Punjab Registrars’ arguments in favor of, 11, 20–21, 24–25, 30, 36, 49, 60, 67; Tanganyika Territory, 49; Uganda, 17, 102, 132–33, 135–37; Zanzibar, 41–45, 59 cooperative laws: Colonial Office model ordinance, 99–100, 154; and European settler control in Africa, 38; and ICS theorizing about mutual control and moral discipline, 20, 26–28; in Kenya, 57–58, 72, 81; in Malaya, 31; as mechanism to thwart anti-­colonial politics, 108–9; 1904 Indian Cooperative Societies Act, 15–16; in Palestine, 26; in Tanganyika Territory, 45–46, 48–51; in Uganda, 56, 106–8, 119, 130–32, 134–38 Cooperative Party (UK), 131, 147–48; and anti-­apartheid activism, 159; and cooperation in the colonies, 153–54, 156, 160; debating support for the MCF, 163–64; UAFU contacts within, 124 Cooperative Union (UK), 5, 153, 155, 165 Cooperative Wholesale Society (CWS), 5, 149–51, 158, 173; working conditions on its tea estates in Ceylon/Sri Lanka, 150–51, 232nn32,33,34 Darling, Malcolm, 24, 69–70, 100 Davis, J. Merle, 66–67, 88–89 Daybreak in the Colonies, 153–54, 156–57, 159

Index    257 Daybreak in Udi, 152–53, 178 development groups: cooperatives and development group formation, 15, 27, 100, 36; as propaganda channels, 25, 30, 122, 177 Dewey, John, 68–69, 75, 78, 177 Dougall, J. W. C., 73–74, 89, 206n48; as advisor to Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment, 89; ideas about “the African mind,” 75–76; pedagogy of cooperation, 77–78, 177; views on the role of the state and the church in social life and fears about African nationalism, 82–83 Dreschfield Commission, 135–37, 225n93 Du Bois, W. E. B., 83–84, 125 Egypt, 107, 109, 139, 143, 226n108 emergency rule: emergency and British “rule of law,” 185n7; as frequent condition in the postwar British empire, 95, 143–44; in Uganda, 110–11, 120–23, 127 esusu rotating credit societies, 11, 188n30 Fabian Colonial Bureau, 6, 56, 99, 109, 123, 162 Fabian socialism, 5, 186n16 Federation of Partnerships of Uganda African Farmers, 113, 116–17, 119, 122–24, 129–39; successor organization to UAFU, 95–96, 129, 225n92. See also Uganda African Farmers Union (UAFU) Gandhi, Mahatma, 33, 165–66, 205n33; colonial officials’ fears concerning Gandhism, 22, 33–34; influence on Musazi, 96 Garvey, Marcus, 37; missionary and government fears about Garveyism in Africa, 3, 71–72, 84 Gezira Development Scheme, 102–4, 116 Ghana, 37, 97, 140, 143 Hall, John Hathorn, 112–14, 117, 134; arrest of Musazi, 128–29; banning of the UAFU and Bataka Union and burning of cotton, 95, 120; development plans for Uganda, 99, 104, 122; expansion of emergency powers, 121; mocked by Padmore, 125; exit from Uganda, 129 Hampton Institute, 64, 83 Hatch, Duane Spencer, 69, 205n30 Huss, Bernard, 71–73, 83, 85, 92, 177 Indian Civil Service, Punjab: 1900 Land Alienation Act in tandem with

cooperative law, 21; rescuing Muslim “agriculturalists,” 23; technoscience of development, 8, 21, 23. See also cooperative department, Punjab; Strickland, Claude Francis indirect rule, 2–3, 11, 20; and culture change in Africa, 12, 176; as practice of slowing social change and stabilizing colonial order, 7–8; in the Punjab ICS, 23; in Tanganyika Territory, 45–46, 48, 55; in Uganda, 95, 114, 218n59; in Zanzibar, 39 International Cooperative Alliance, 5, 151, 155 International Missionary Council (IMC): and the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment, 87–88; Department of Social and Industrial Research, 66, 88; Jerusalem meeting and resolutions, 64–66, 74; ­Tambaram meeting, 66, 89 Iraq, 107, 109, 200n135 Ismaili Council of Nairobi, 57 Jeanes school (Kenya), 73–74, 82–84; colonial officials’ fears about Jeanes teachers’ political activism, 85–86; commonalities with and influence of Moga school, 206nn48,49; cooperatives and cooperative training at the Kabete campus, 75, 78–79, 81–82; cooperatives started by Jeanes teachers in the field, 79–80; as psychological study of “the African mind,” 75–76 Jeanes school (Nyasaland/Malawi), 74, 76–77, 84, 91 Jones, Thomas Jesse, 64, 70, 189n33 Kenya, 3, 15, 34, 37, 48, 110–11, 201n144; and Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment films, 88–91; Mau Mau Uprising, 111, 121, 144, 147, 165; settlers’ cooperative law, 57–58; settlers’ marketing control, 47, 81, 91. See also Jeanes school (Kenya) Keppel, Frederick, 61–62, 73, 83, 88 Kilimanjaro Native Cooperative Union (KNCU): and Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment films, 88, 90–91; and coffee marketing monopoly, protests against, and government repression, 50–56; and Cooperative College (UK), 155–56; restructured from Kilimanjaro Native Planters Association to shore up indirect rule, 48 Kilimanjaro Native Planters Association (KNPA), 47–48, 50–51

258     Index Kingdon Commission of Inquiry, 95, 111, 127–28, 133, 213, 218n59 Kivuva, Aaron, 79–80 land banks: Strickland’s objections to, 28, 36; Uganda Credit and Savings Bank, 132–34, 226n108 Lander, William, 149 Laski, Harold, 115, 130, 213n6, 219n16 Last, J. S., 44–45, 59 Latham, G. C., 88–93, 212n151 League of Nations, 9, 34, 38, 52, 55, 100 London Cooperative Society (LCS): and the colonial cooperation program at Cooperative College, 156; and the “colour bar” in its roundsman delivery business, 17, 148, 156, 167–71; “fraternal link” with Victoria Federation of Co-­operatives Unions; and MCF organizing, 162–63, 165; and the Month of Boycott, 172–73 Lugard, Frederick, 2, 8, 29, 46, 58, 88, 177, 184n3 Lukabi, Samuel, 117, 127, 213n3 Mafeking, Elizabeth, 166 mailo land tenure system, 113–14, 116, 219nn5,6,7 Maine, Henry, 7–8, 187n22 Malaya, 9–10, 28, 108–9, 144, 178; Malayan Communist Party, 109; officials’ fears about rising anti-­colonial movements, 33–34; rubber and colonial capitalism, 29; Strickland’s study tour, 30–34. See also Malayan Emergency Malayan Emergency, 108–9; community development as part of New Villages, 144, 225n5; A New Life: Squatter Resettlement (film), 178 marketing boards, 47, 99, 196n71, 214n13, for ­coffee and cotton in Uganda, 94, 105–6, 117, 133, 216nn38,43; and postwar agricultural planning, 97 Martandam YMCA Rural Reconstruction ­Centre, 68–69, 205n30 mass education, 86–88, 93, 122 McKee, William, 69–71 Miller, Maeve, 162 Ministry of Food, 97, 105 Ministry of Information, 152–53 Moga Training School, 69–70, 73–75, 79, 205n33, 206n48 Movement of Colonial Freedom (MCF), 96, 124; and the British cooperative movement, 18, 147, 161–66

Mukalisi, Joyce, 123 Mulumba, Semakula, 115, 118–19, 128, 139, 218n59; activities in London, 96, 123–27; cooperative groups aligned with, 129–30, 138 Musazi, Ignatius: and the African League, 125–26; contacts in anti-­colonial and Pan-­Africanist networks in the UK, 124; critique of colonial power and counter-­ vision of cooperative development, 96, 112, 113, 115–16; exile in and writing from London, 119, 123, 127; involvement in 1945 transport workers’ strike and hopes to bridge cooperative and trade union movements, 112; opposition to the Cooperative Registrar, 132; response to the Kingdon Report, 95, 111, 213n3; return to Buganda and subsequent arrest and “rustication,” 128–29; and the Uganda National Congress, 113, 129, 139. See also Uganda African Farmers Union (UAFU) Musoke, Festo Kibuka, 127 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 100 Nigeria: colonial officials’ enthusiasm for and movement toward Strickland’s cooperative system, 12, 59; and Daybreak in Udi, 152; esusu rotating credit societies, 11, 188n30; maternity cooperatives, 154 1900 Land Alienation Act (Punjab), 21 1900 Uganda Agreement, 113–15, 127 Nkrumah, Kwame, 83, 124, 140 Noakes, Diane, 130, 134, 225n93 Non-­Aligned Movement, 1, 141 Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), 66, 88–89, 140, 143, 196n71 Notcutt, Leslie Allen, 88–93, 212n151 Nyasaland (Malawi), 74, 76, 77, 84, 89, 143 Nyerere, Julius, 118, 140, 143 Oldham, Joseph, 61–62, 71, 73, 83, 177 Owen, Robert, 4, 8–9, 21, 188n24 Owen Falls Dam, 101fig., 102 Padmore, George, 124–25 Palestine, 10, 34–37, 60 Peddie, James, 151, 158 Phelps-­Stokes, 62, 64, 73–74, 189n33 planning, international postwar development: community development ascendant, 100; cooperatives in Labour government’s colonial development plan, 99–100, 179;

Index    259 United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, 97, 100 political technology. See technopolitics Progressive Party of the Working People, Cyprus (AKEL), 109 project lessons: depicted in Daybreak in Udi, 178; and Dewey’s “New Education,” 68; and Jeanes school (Kenya) cooperatives, 77–78; missionary community development as, 68, 177; and the Moga school, 69–70 Punjab. See Indian Civil Service, Punjab Raiffeisen, Friedrich Wilhelm, 8, 24; and Bernard Huss’s credit cooperative campaign in South Africa, 71–72; ICS efforts to start Raiffeisen societies, 9, 24, 27 Registrar, cooperative societies (colonial official): controversial controlling powers, 49, 56, 176, 227n113; as hybrid teacher and evangelist, 26; as main pivot of colonial cooperative system, 14, 20, 99; office dissolved in Uganda, 135–36; opposed by Uganda African Farmers Union, 107, 131–32, 134, 137, 177; seen within British cooperative movement as temporarily necessary in colonies, 154; Strickland’s views of role and ideal administrator for it, 24–25, 44 risk: technics of, 26–28, 49 Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society, 4, 186n11, 192n43; Rochdale principles, 4–5, 8, 134, 140, 147, 154 Ross, J. W., 130–31, 137, 225n93 rural indebtedness: and clove growers on Zanzibar and Pemba, 39–44, 198n93; in India and ICS plans to solve with Raiffeisen credit cooperatives, 8–11, 23–24, 29; and officials’ interpretation of unrest in late 1940s Uganda, 132–33; in Palestine and Strickland’s cooperative prescriptions, 34–37; and Punjab Land Alienation Act, 21; Strickland’s assessment of causes of indebtedness in Malaya, 31 rural reconstruction, 21, 29, 61–63, 175–76, 188n24, 191n38; colonial cooperation’s roots in, 9, 14, 176; and community development as practiced by Christian missions in India and Africa, 66–70, 72–73, 87; and emergency rule, 95–96 rural sociology: of Christian missions, 63, 74; of the Indian Civil Service, 23, 70

self-­help, 4, 46, 72, 122, 152–53; and liberal vision of individual, state, and social welfare, 28; in missionary rural reconstruction, 69–70; and Owenism, 8; teacher of self-­help as performed identity for late-­colonial Britons, 178–79 Shepherd, George, 116, 122–23, 130, 135, 218n60 Sierra Leone, 30, 59, 150, 157 social gospel, 64, 69, 72, 88, 177 Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), 84, 143, 145, 160 spectacle of community development, 1, 3, 152, 153, 183n1; and British cooperative movement’s postwar self-­image, 142, 172; colonial rhetorics of teaching and learning, 13, 50, 72, 178–79, 180fig.; cooperatives as enactment of and key signifier, 18, 97, 151, 178; Gezira demonstration farm, 102–3; search for rhetorical forms and media, 73, 90, 121 Ssonko, Peter, 131 Stockdale, Frank, 42, 49, 57 Stonehouse, John 109, 129–31, 137, 162, 179, 223n65 Strickland, Claude Francis, 2, 9–12, 15; ambition for cooperative departments as rural-­ sociological knowledge producers, 20, 32–33, 44; austerity argument for cooperative development, 11–12; Carnegie tour of West Africa, 30, 59, 62; character and moral reform, arguments on, 24, 32, 36–37, 41–44; colonial cooperatives and education systems, arguments on, 59–60; Colonial Office, influence in the, 49, 57–58; cooperative-­law-­writing assignment with Tanganyika Territory, 11, 45–46, 49–50; crisis of social change in Africa, arguments on, 19–20; debtors’ prison, arguments for, 20; defense of indirect rule, 58–59; imperial vision for cooperatives, 20–22; land banks, arguments against, 28, 36; Malaya study tour, 9, 30–34; missionary community developers, influence on, 60–62; Palestine, visit to 10, 34–37; Punjab ICS career, 9, 22; Registrar as main pivot of colonial cooperative movement, arguments for, 20, 24, 44; slow growth of colonial cooperative movements, arguments for, 30; Zanzibar tour, 10–11, 39–45 Surridge, B. J., 99–100, 109, 137, 155 Tanganyika Territory, 3, 61–62, 89; coffee growing, marketing, 46–48; indirect rule,

260     Index Tanganyika Territory (continued) 45–46, 48, 55; protests and subsequent deportations and repression (and international news coverage of British use of military planes), 51–56; restructuring of cooperative marketing and the “Chagga Rule,” 48–51; Strickland’s work on new cooperative law, 11, 45–46, 49–51. See also Kilimanjaro Native Cooperative Union (KNCU); Kilimanjaro Native Planters Association (KNPA); Victoria Federation of Co-­operatives Unions technopolitics: and Cold War ideological battles, 93, 95; colonial cooperation as, 1–2, 175–76; cooperative rule as transportable solution for variety of colonial social crises, 22, 58; and ICS usage of cooperatives, 23; Uganda cooperative law as, 107 Tete-­Ansa, Winifred, 37 Thuku, Harry, 83–84 trusteeship, 11; British officials’ interpretation of their trustee role in Palestine, 34; development and, 21; and Kenya, 57; and League of Nations mandates, 38; and Tanganyika, 46, 55 Tuskegee Institute, 64, 70, 83 Uganda: development planning, 103–4; emergency rule, 110–11, 120–23, 127; mailo land tenure system, 113–14, 116, 219nn5,6,7; marketing structure and controls (cotton and coffee), 107, 117; Nsamizi community development training center, 102. See also Uganda African Farmers Union (UAFU) Uganda African Farmers Union (UAFU): and anti-­Indian rhetoric, 117–18; boycott, 17, 94, 106, 112, 117, 138; connection with Bataka Union, 95; continuous organizing while banned during emergency rule, 127–28; cooperative farm, 116; and efforts to decolonize the cooperative law, 130–32,

134–38; and efforts to dismantle anti-­African colonial marketing laws (cotton and coffee), 94, 105–6, 110, 117, 138–39; members’ cotton burned by military, 94; as national political organization, 117; opposition to cooperative movement of state planning and the Registrar, 96, 109, 131–32. See also Federation of Partnerships of Uganda African Farmers Uganda Department of Public Relations and Social Welfare (DPRSW), 103, 122–23, 126, 222n54 Uganda National Congress, 113, 129, 139, 162 ujamaa, 118, 140–41 United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), 97, 100 Urbanski, Arthur, 162–64, 173 Victoria Federation of Co-­operatives Unions, 157, 159, 234n52 Walford, Arthur Selwood, 77, 80–82, 86 Webb, Beatrice, 157, 186n16, 192n43 Webb, Sidney, 5, 35, 62, 157, 186n16; and Kenya’s cooperative law, 57–58; and Strickland’s study tours, 30, 37 Wilberforce, S., 26–27, 36, 175 Women’s Cooperative Guild (UK), 160–62, 165–67 World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh (1910), 64, 73 Worthington, E. B., 103–4, 116, 122 Zanzibar: colonial rule and Omani aristocracy, 10–11, 39; cooperative shops and competition between nationalist parties, 118; plans to rescue indebted clove growers, 39–40; short-­lived Cooperative Department, 44–45; Strickland’s tour and recommendations, 41–44

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