Decline or Fall?

In the 20th century, the vastest empire of all is challenging the ancient historical cycle of rise, decline and fall. Great Britain hopes to accomplish this feat by an agile balance of yield and hold; and by shifting from an imperial dominance-by-one to a Commonwealth partnership of all. Can the British succeed where all other empires have failed?

Last week the question was agitating Africa, the last stronghold of empire, where Britain still holds sway over 4,600,000 square miles and 65 million people.

At best, the British in Africa seek slowly to guide what Kipling called their "new-caught, sullen peoples'' across the blur of centuries that divides them from the modern world. At worst, British settlers expect to live, at least until the deluge, off the sweat, tears and ignorance of African servitors.

Between these two extremes, best represented in Africa by Prime Minister Nkrumah's self-governing Gold Coast and Prime Minister Malan's Jim Crow South Africa, there is a no man's land of strife, where one day it will be decided whether Empire can change to Commonwealth across the barriers of race.

Signs of Decay. A realization that this decision may come sooner than they expect, and that it may be unfavorable, underlay a great colonial debate that welled up among Britons last week. The focus of debate was the British protectorate of Uganda, but the real context was wider. From Cape Town to Suez, the fabric of empire is visibly disintegrating. In the north, the vast Sudan fortnight ago turned its back on Britain (TIME, Dec. 7). In the south, Boer South Africa talks of becoming a republic, and of leaving the Commonwealth. In between (see map), there is war in Kenya, unrest in Nyasaland, and in the Rhodesias a harassed attempt to build up a Central African Federation.

Trouble in Uganda cuts deep, and lays a heavy burden on the British conscience. It leaves Whitehall less convinced that by giving way, it gains. Uganda is the showcase of British imperialism: prosperous (on coffee and cotton), well governed (by Sanders-of-the-River-style district officers), untouched by the racial discord that disfigures neighboring Kenya. Understandably, Britons argued that if Uganda is in peril, the Empire is nowhere safe.

In God's Name, Go. In the House of Commons, Laborite after Laborite leaped to his feet to denounce the Kabaka's deposition as a "classic blunder" and the person and policies of Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton as disastrous. M.P.s on both sides had been shocked by reports of British military brutalities in Kenya. Britons were dismayed that the Colonial Office had kept a group of suspected Guiana Communists in jail for ten weeks, without bringing them to trial (TIME, Nov. 2). The Laborites blamed all these things on Oliver Lyttelton.

Leading Labor's attack was a pale, impassioned Bevanite named Archibald Fenner Brockway, son of an African missionary. Staring across the House at Lyttelton, he invoked Oliver Cromwell's terrible injunction to the Long Parliament: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!" Though the House was dissatisfied with Lyttelton, these strong words went too far.*

"The More Painful." Lyttelton rose to reply amid Socialist hisses and cries of "shame." Ordinarily a poor speaker who is apt to leave the impression that the Labor Opposition should be seen and not heard, he is disliked, as was his father "Chinese Slavery" Lyttelton, the Colonial-Secretary who in 1902 outraged British sensitivities by permitting South African mine owners to import indentured coolies. Born to wealth and position, "Lyt" is aloofly what he is: a blueblooded Old Etonian who won first-class honors at Cambridge; a Grenadier Guards officer who won a D.S.O. in World War I; a successful capitalist who made a fortune on the Stock Exchange. Last week, with his back against the wall, this blunt, strapping businessman confounded his foes by his shining sincerity.

He took his stand with Abraham Lincoln on the necessity of using force to preserve a lasting union. To permit Buganda to secede from the rest of Uganda, as the Kabaka demanded, he said, would be "a fatal blow ... to the [protectorate's] national life . . . Our object as in Nigeria is to maintain and knit together a unitary state."

It was when he spoke of the 29-year-old Kabaka that the gruff Colonial Secretary most moved the House of Commons; it was a rare look at his personal feelings. "This morning I had a long talk with the Kabaka. He was alone and feels severely the loss of his sister . . . This conversation was extremely painful to me because of [his] dignified and correct bearing," said Lyttelton, and added characteristically, "It was the more painful to me because he was a member of my university and of my regiment and a friend of my son's at Cambridge."

Leap & Thrust. That night, the House of Commons adjourned without taking a vote. This week it meets again, with Labor apparently determined to push through a confidence motion aiming to force Lyttelton's resignation.

Lyttelton's departure would be welcomed in Africa, where many Negroes regard him as Public Enemy No. 1, yet neither votes nor Canutes in London could turn the tide of the times on the African continent. The tragedy is that the leap and thrust of events in Africa, agitated from many sides but controlled by none, is apt to benefit no one--not the white settlers, nor the idealistic educated minority of Africans who want to rush towards an independence their peoples are unready for, nor the great unlettered, buffeted, bewildered African millions themselves.

* Cromwell's castigation was last used, and with deadly effect, by Tory Leopold Amery in 1940, demanding that Neville Chamberlain resign after the invasion of Norway. Within three days. Chamberlain went.

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