1959 is often regarded as a decisive year in the British decolonisation of its tropical African colonies, the watershed moment at which the Empire began to crumble with great speed. Ghana was already two years old as an independent nation, the Sudan had been abandoned in 1956, and across what remained of British Africa, the Empire was entering the stages that immediately prefaced its dissolution. In the West, Nigeria was on the very threshold of independence, while in the Central African territories, nationalist independence movements were gaining in confidence and increasingly coming into open conflict with the colonial authorities, resulting in the imprisonment of both Dr Hastings Banda (Nyasaland) and Kenneth Kaunda (Northern Rhodesia) during the first six months of the year.

East Africa too was in a febrile condition. In Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta was still detained, the Mau Mau Emergency was still not officially over despite the effective suppression of the forest fighters, and atrocities in the Hola camp were brought to light, leading to the eventual closing of the network of detention camps that had operated during the Emergency. In Tanganyika, the Governor, Sir Richard Turnbull, had started to argue for a drastic acceleration of the country’s planned move toward self-determination, after TANU successes in the February elections had pushed him to concede to an African majority in the Council of Ministers. (Turnbull played this hand cleverly, encouraging Government confidence in Julius Nyerere whilst simultaneously predicting a ‘chillingly apocalyptic’ scenario of uprisings if greater concessions were not granted quickly; it should however be noted that this was a late conversion, and even in December 1958 Turnbull still appeared to be committed to continued British presence until at least 1964; Hyam, 2006, 276; Pratt, 1976, 49-50.) In Uganda, the colonial authorities faced a different problem, as the Kingdom of Buganda continued to agitate for an independent status separate from the rest of the Protectorate by repeatedly attempting to stymie reforms and public votes that were intended to lay the groundwork for a unified Ugandan state (Ibingira, 1982, 290-1 and passim). 

The critical turning point is often identified as the appointment, in October 1959, of Iain Macleod as Secretary of State to the Colonies. It was Macleod who saw that the situation required bold action and immediately increased the official tempo of change in Africa. Goldsworthy has noted that even before Macleod’s appointment, Conservative policy on Empire had changed beyond recognition since the beginning of the decade (1971, 315-6 and passim); Hyam has argued that Macmillan’s confidence in his view that decolonisation was necessary and inevitable received a fillip from his successful re-election in 1959, noting that after this date the Empire ‘unravelled instantly and without remission’ (Hyam op.cit., 244). Macleod was the prime metropolitan agent and facilitator of this unravelling.

Pressure of events had led not only to a far greater acceptance of the necessity of dissolving the Empire, but to a drastic re-evaluation of the old ‘gradualist’ view that sought to thoroughly prepare the political and social ground before independence – the so-called ‘Gold Coast’ model, whereby independence would be achieved ‘in accordance with a schedule painstakingly devised and argued about over a period of several years’ (Goldsworthy, op.cit., 361). Driven in part by fear of having another Mau Mau to contend with, Macleod’s guiding view was that the risks of moving slowly on independence for African countries were far greater than those of moving quickly. In a much quoted 1964 Spectator editorial, he would describe his policy (and Imperial limitations) with candour:

It has been said that after I became Colonial Secretary there was a deliberate speeding up of the movement towards independence. I agree. There was. And in my view any other policy would have lead to terrible bloodshed in Africa…

Were the countries fully ready for independence? Of course not… (quoted in Goldsworthy, ibid., 363)

Indeed, it was this latter criterion that was crucially jettisoned, and Macleod oversaw the requirements for independence reduced to a bare, pragmatic minimum: ‘All that mattered was that an indigenous political élite, with some degree of local support, should exist and be willing to take over’ (ibid., 361).

It was this reduced requirement that would guide future decolonisation in Africa. A year before his landmark speech in South Africa, Macmillan’s famous ‘wind of change’ was already blowing with some force, and the Colonial Office under Macleod had well understood not only the economic and geopolitical imperatives to begin the wind-down of the African Empire, but more importantly that imperial power in British Africa was at grave risk of shattering if it did not quickly bend.