Abstract
The first decade following the transfer of power to successive new nations from within the colonial empire was characterized by a glow of mutual congratulations on one feature above all in the imperial governmental legacy. This was the inheritance of a sound civil service derived from many years of the finest British traditions of efficiency, dedication, loyalty to whatever elected government was in power, and total incorruptibility. That at least was the image, promoted and generally perceived. The fact that different circumstances and needs had meant that Britain’s successor civil services were not necessarily the same thing as the metropolitan Home Civil Service, in responsibilities as well as recruitment, was beside the point. The message, a two-way donor-receiver one, was clear and for the most part genuine: in the legacy of the British connection, ‘we’ gave ‘you’ the democratic model of a civil service second to none. In return the other ‘we’ are grateful to the other ‘you’ for such a priceless bequest. Parliamentarianism might need a little longer to take root. In the wake of a government which was by definition ‘imperial’, democracy might need a little longer yet. But the rule of law and its instrument of an upright, impartial and trained civil service were already in operation, ready loyally to serve the new government. Localization of the bureaucracy was as transparent a symbol of the transfer of power as was the new national flag.
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Notes
Mary Bennett, The Ilberts in India, 1882–1886, 1995, 48ff.
David Kimble, A Political History of Ghana, 1850–1928, 1963, 87ff.
Sir Frederick Lugard, Political Memoranda, 1919, Memo No. 1, para. 4.
For the Malayan system, see J. M. Gullick, Rulers and Residents: Influence and Power in the Malay States, 1870–1920, 1992
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See also A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, ‘Forging a Relationship with the Colonial Administrative Service’, in Alison Smith and Mary Bull, eds, Margery Perham and British Rule in Africa, 1991, ch.4.
Quoted in Richard Symonds, The British and their Successors, 1966, 103.
The same trenchant message runs through Sir Gordon Guggisberg’s gubernatorial treatise on what education must mean for the African — The Keystone, 1924.
Quoted in Sir Edward Blunt, The Indian Civil Service, 1937, 49.
L. S. S. O’Malley, The Indian Civil Service, 1931, 17.
Philip Mason, The Guardians, 1954, 156ff.
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Reproduced in Sir T. Raleigh, Lord Curzon in India, 1906, 60.
R. Hunt and J. Harrison, The District Officer in India, 1980, xxii.
See Roger Perkins, The Punjab Mail Murder, 1986.
Cf. J. W. Wright, ‘A Note on … Promotion Prospects’ in D. Lavin, ed., The Making of the Sudan State, 1991, 175–6.
G. W. Bell, Shadows on the Sand, 1983, 62.
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Quoted in K. D. D. Henderson, The Making of the Modern Sudan, 1953, 541.
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From one of the poems in K. D. D. Henderson and T. R. H. Owen, eds, Sudan Verse, 1963, 66–7.
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Kwame Arhin, West African Colonial Civil Servants in the 19th Century, 1985.
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See also J. de Vere Allen, ‘Malayan Civil Service, 1874–1941: Colonial Bureaucracy/Malayan Elite’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 12, 2, 1970.
In Charles Allen, Tales from the South China Seas, 1983, 91.
Cf. J. O’Regan, From Empire to Commonwealth, 1994, ch. 2.
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Quoted in C.A. Baker, ‘Africanization in the Administrative Service’, in A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, ed., The Transfer of Power: the Colonial Administrator in the Age of Decolonization, 1979, 165.
A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, ‘The Higher Public Service’, in L. F. Blitz, ed., The Politics and Administration of Nigerian Government, 1965, 246–7.
Extensive data are to be found in Kenneth Younger, The Public Service in New States, 1960
R. Symonds, The British and their Successors, 1966. Some of the statistics have been rounded off here.
The concept, now widely enough used to shed its inverted commas were it not for the consequent loss of its creators’ identity, was introduced by D. A. Low and J. M. Lonsdale in their Introduction to History of East Africa, eds., D. A. Low and Alison Smith, vol. III, 1976, 12. It denotes the inflow of development funds in the 1950s and the concomitant increase in European civil servants at a time when their reduction and a policy of localization might have been expected to be the order of the day against approaching independence.
Prime Minister’s letter CMC/17/65/049, dated 1 May 1961, accompanying localization statistics for the Provincial Administration, reproduced in John Lewis-Barned, A Fanfare of Trumpets, 1943, 113ff.
For a complete table for the period 1958–77, see Baker, ‘Africanization’, 173.
For a description of the conference held at Chequers in 1959 to determine the likely dates of withdrawal, see C. Douglas-Home, Evelyn Baring, 1978, 283ff
Michael Blundell, So Rough a Wind, 1964, ch.15.
A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, ‘Diplomacy and Diplomats: the Formation of Foreign Service Cadres in Black Africa’, in K. Ingham, ed., Foreign Relations of African States, 1974, 279–322.
The survivor was R. Sadleir. His memoir, ‘Sunset and Sunrise in Tanzania’, is scheduled for publication in 1999.
D. Hawley, Sandtracks in the Sudan, 1995, 117.
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Kirk-Greene, A. (2000). The Transfer of Power and Localization. In: Britain’s Imperial Administrators, 1858–1966. St. Antony’s series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286320_9
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