Empire and nation-building in the Caribbean: Barbados, 1937–66

By Mary Chamberlain

This original and exciting book examines the processes of nation building in the British West Indies.

It argues that nation building was a more complex and messy affair, involving women and men in a range of social and cultural activities, in a variety of migratory settings, within a unique geo-political context. Taking as a case study Barbados which, in the 1930s, was the most economically impoverished, racially divided, socially disadvantaged and politically conservative of the British West Indian colonies, Empire and nation-building tells the messy, multiple stories of how a colony progressed to a nation.

It is the first book to tell all sides of the independence story and will be of interest to specialists and non-specialists interested in the history of Empire, the Caribbean, of de-colonisation and nation building.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781847797339

Mary Chamberlain

Mary Chamberlain has lived and worked in England and the Caribbean, and is Emeritus Professor of History at Oxford Brookes University. Her book, Fenwomen, was the first to be published by Virago Press in 1975. Since then she has written many books on women's history, oral history and Caribbean history. She is a graduate of the acclaimed Creative Writing MA at Royal Holloway, University of London and now lives in London with her husband.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

The riots was just like a volcano, it build up and then suddenly erupt. What was the treatment, the conditions which the majority lived under, you couldn’t believe a human being was living under a government with those conditions.¹

You see, under the colonialism in those years … we find it tough, very tough. Things were not so bright. Work hard. Small wages … Didn’t have no clothes, no money. Couldn’t feed yourself. I would say that was a very oppressive time.²

The Great Depression of the 1930s had hit the West Indies like a hurricane, devastating the already precarious national economies in its wake and with it the even more precarious household economies of its workers. Migration – the great safety valve of the region – had come to a standstill. Work was intermittent or non-existent; wages were low, malnutrition rife, housing deplorable. Apart from the privileged few, West Indians were poorly educated and in many cases illiterate. Child labour was common. The nature of the franchise or the nature of local patronage meant that the West Indian colonies were governed in the interests of the wealth producers – considered universally to be the plantation and industrial owners. Without exception, local rule favoured the privileges of the elite who were, almost universally, white.

Barbados was one of the poorest of Britain’s territories in the Caribbean, the slums of Bridgetown among the worst. Life expectancy was the lowest, and child mortality by far the highest in the West Indies. In 1937, 41.14 per cent of all deaths occurred in children under five years old.³ The island’s economy was wholly dependent on sugar, for which unemployment and under-employment had been a permanent and, for the planters, necessary fixture of the labour climate since 1838. The price of sugar had been steadily falling throughout the twentieth century, reaching an all time low in 1934 when it fetched five shillings a ton (compared, for instance, with 1923 when it had fetched twenty six shillings a ton).⁴ As a result, planters sought to return as much sugar as possible in order to retrieve costs. Arable land that hitherto had grown vegetables was turned to sugar production, while agricultural wages were cut to the bone. Rural workers and those with access to a small plot of land were forced to grow sugar as a cash crop to supplement income, at the expense of fresh garden produce. These difficulties were compounded by a ‘sudden and abnormal’ increase in the price of basic imported foodstuffs between December 1936 and June 1937, coinciding with a ‘scarcity of locally grown provisions.’⁵ Furthermore, the economic crises in the 1930s in Cuba, Panama and the Dominican Republic had triggered a political backlash against West Indian migrant workers who were expelled.⁶ Most migrants had no choice but to return to their home islands. Within the space of five years, the population in Barbados leapt from an estimated 176,874 in 1932 to 190,939 in 1937.⁷ Unemployment was made worse not only by the rapid increase in population but also by new technologies which led to grinding times being reduced from five months to three, and the mechanisation of transport reducing the number of freighters and carters. In turn, this had a knock-on effect on a range of subsidiary skilled workers such as carpenters, wheelwrights, blacksmiths and so on. This, coupled with an historic resistance to land reform, resulted in a population decimated by migration and devastated by poverty and disease.⁸

The problems were compounded by the profound racial divisions in the island.⁹ Barbados was ruled by a white oligarchy. Eligibility to vote was determined by gender and property ownership or income, set beyond the reach of all but the highest paid or land rich. In 1938, out of a total estimated population of 193,082, the voters numbered some 6,545 men – 7.2 per cent of the total male population (and 10.1 per cent of the adult male population).¹⁰ Those who occupied seats in the House of Assembly and in the Legislative Council were broadly representative of the planter class, the most reactionary sector in the British West Indies. The executive was weak and out of touch, and administration slow and inefficient. Parsimony ruled the public purse. Unlike other West Indian territories which were under Crown Colony rule, in Barbados there was no ultimate control. ‘The division of power in this small mixed community’, wrote William Macmillan in 1937, ‘helps white interests to dominate; but no local body is fully responsible, and His Majesty’s Secretary of State is in practice as helpless as the Governor whether against constitutional obstruction or mere inertia.’¹¹ ‘The Barbados Government’, commented Prescott Childs, the American Consul in Barbados ‘are very careful spenders and finance only the necessities of life … so there are slums, low wages, under-nourishment, poorly paid teachers, low taxes, et cetera, and a government surplus of about two hundred thousand Pounds sterling.’¹²

There was neither a mechanism through which workers’ complaints and sufferings could be channelled nor any one individual prepared to listen. The planters were indifferent, the British unwilling. Charles Duncan O’Neal, the workers’ champion of the 1920s, was dead, the Democratic League and the Working Men’s Association (renamed the Barbados Political Association) all but defunct; the Barbados Herald, the only newspaper brave enough to articulate workers’ grievances, was in abeyance and Clennell Wickham, its editor, had had to migrate to Grenada. The broad direct appeal of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) was diminishing, and there was nothing of any comparable stature to replace it.

On 26 March 1937, Clement Payne disembarked at Bridgetown harbour. Confronted by the Harbour Authorities, he cited as his birthplace Barbados. Payne had been brought up in Trinidad by Barbadian parents who had migrated there some three decades earlier. He probably felt a dual allegiance to both Trinidad and Barbados, and we can imagine that he had assumed – wrongly, as it turned out – that he had, in fact, been born in Barbados. Thirty-three years old, a keen amateur dramatist, a committed socialist and an experienced organiser, Payne was also a member of the Negro Welfare Cultural and Social Association, one of the many Marxist (perhaps Comintern-funded) groups which had emerged in the 1930s dedicated to anti-colonialism and the struggle against capitalism.¹³ The Association had gauged that the time was ripe in Barbados to launch an initiative there, and Payne had been sent as its emissary. He may have been a little nervous as he approached the Harbour Authority; he may indeed have told a white lie in order to expedite his entry. It was, in any case, a seemingly innocuous claim to make to a bored official running through the check-list of data required for new arrivals.

Teaming up with some like-minded Barbadians – Israel Lovell, F. G. ‘Menzies’ Chase, Ulrick Grant, Darnley ‘Brain’ Alleyne among them – all luminaries of the UNIA, all committed and (in the view of the police) notorious socialists, Payne set out to organise the workers of Barbados.¹⁴ He held a series of public meetings in Bridgetown and its immediate environs, stating the case for trade unions (which were illegal) and arguing on the role of capitalism in exploiting the workers, and generating racial discrimination. He was a powerful speaker and a practised agitator. His rallying cry – ‘Educate, agitate, but do not violate!’ – struck a particular chord in Barbados, which had long clung to an ethos of education and – with a few exceptions – had not, for the most part, been inclined to active and violent resistance throughout its 300-year-old history. Violate no, but educate and agitate – yes. Attendance at his meetings in March had begun with a handful. By July, they were counted in their thousands.

Despair and powerlessness were no strangers to Barbadians; but with the exception of the Federation Riots in 1876, neither had been sufficient to trigger major revolt. This time, however, things were different. There was a discontent and a restlessness which were Caribbean-wide, as sugar workers and industrial workers from British Guiana to Jamaica struggled to improve wages and conditions. The turning point had come in 1934 when major strikes and riots broke out first in British Honduras (now Belize), followed by St Kitts (1935), St Vincent (1935), St Lucia (1936) and Trinidad (1934 and 1937). The riots – so widespread and uniform that they amounted to an insurgency – expressed an anguish and an anger which embodied the regional pain and frustration. Barbadians were well aware of this, and Payne was able not only to put into words the weariness and desperation inherent in their situation but to make sense of it within a broader intellectual and political framework. The police kept a wary eye on Payne’s movement and activities as in the course of a few months he built up a strong following among the working class and unemployed of the capital. Their surveillance was matched by what had been in effect a newspaper blackout on reporting any disturbances in Barbados, and Payne considered it one of his duties to redress what he described as this deceit. By 15 July things began to come to a head. News of riots in Trinidad in June – conveyed by Payne at a meeting in Golden Square – highlighted the demands of the rioters and the injustices of the response. ‘This meeting’, Payne recalled in his memoirs, ‘was a record one in the History of the Island’.¹⁵ The authorities, anxious to diffuse the situation, seized on Payne as a trouble-maker and potential ringleader (just before the launch, as he retrospectively argued in his memoirs, of the Barbados Progressive Working Men’s Association) and arrested him on the charge of making a false declaration of his place of birth to the Harbour Authorities. On 22 July he was tried, defended by the young and ambitious lawyer, Grantley Adams, but convicted and fined. He decided to appeal, through both legal and direct channels. The following day – 23 July – he and a large crowd marched on Government House to protest the conviction. Many were arrested, including Payne, but only Payne was detained on remand, and an order for his deportation quietly issued. Three days later, although the court of appeal quashed his conviction, the authorities refused to release him. Instead, they deported him secretly to Trinidad. When news of this leaked out, it triggered days of bloody rioting. Although the major disturbances were concentrated in Bridgetown and St Michael, over the ensuing days of turbulence the rioting and looting spread out to the country areas. The tectonic plates of poverty and race, upon which Barbados was built, had finally collided. The impact was nationwide.

Fourteen people were killed, forty-seven wounded, and nearly 300 given prison sentences of up to ten years. The sentences were harsh and unfair, but ‘these are black people that you are dealing with there. And this was in the riots. And they mash up white people’s property … there was no doubt in the mind [of the chief justice] that he was going to give the maximum.’¹⁶ The Governor, Sir Mark Young, appointed a commission under the chairmanship of Sir George Deane, a former chief justice of the Gold Coast, to investigate the causes of the riots – although not before Grantley Adams had tried to intervene by securing an interview with the Secretary of State at which he sought both to extricate himself from any blame in the riots, and at the same time highlight the need for social reform.¹⁷ The Deane Commission reported on 2 November 1937. The commissioners drew comfort from their conclusion that the main protagonists in the riots were the,

lawless persons, of whom unfortunately there are numbers in every district in the island, [who] heard of the disturbances in Bridgetown … Those who took an active part in the disturbances were drawn from a comparatively small section of the community consisting of young and irresponsible youths and young women.¹⁸

But they also pointed to both poverty and over-population as the prime causes of the riots. Among the recommendations of the Deane Commission were a programme of public works, slum clearance, the establishment of a food watch committee to monitor prices and the appointment of a labour officer to mediate in disputes, noting that ‘Barbados is singularly backward in the organisation of labour’.¹⁹ It also recommended extending police powers and the sedition laws, so that police could seize inflammatory material and enter any premises in which a meeting of more than ten people was being held.²⁰ In the Commissioners’ view, however, only wide-scale emigration could begin to alleviate Barbados’ problem.

The riots in Barbados proved to be one stop in the sequel of disturbances in the West Indies. That same year the Bahamas erupted, followed by Jamaica and Antigua in 1938 and British Guiana, now Guyana, in 1938 and 1939. Disturbed by the scale and seriousness of the disturbances throughout the region, the British Government appointed a Royal Commission, under the chairmanship of Lord Moyne, to investigate the causes and make recommendations. ‘It took a blood purge’, wrote Wynter Crawford later in the Barbados Observer, ‘to make the bureaucratic governments of Downing Street and Barbados realise their responsibilities. If 1937 did not provide internal pressure, then we do not know what internal pressure is.’²¹ Travelling through the Caribbean, the Moyne Commission held public hearings and invited evidence from a wide range of people and organisations. The response was indicative: a vast range of people, from professionals to workers, wrote in with their comments, experiences and interpretations.

In terms of the specific recommendations the West India Royal Commission made for Barbados, alleviating the problems of overpopulation through emigration ‘must rank high for favourable consid-eration.’²² Regionally, it recommended the establishment of the West Indian Welfare Fund, to be financed by an annual grant of £1,000,000 for a period of twenty years, under the direction of an appointed Comptroller. This promised to be the largest injection of aid the region had ever seen. The Fund would be earmarked for education, health services, housing and slum clearance, the creation of labour departments (which would include the formation of trade unions and the creation of wage boards), social welfare facilities and land settlement. Sir Frank Stockdale, the former agricultural adviser to the Colonial Office, was appointed as the first Comptroller of the West Indian Welfare Fund.

As E. P. Thompson observed, somewhat sardonically, in a different place and at a different time, but with comparable insight,

the nature of gentlefolks being what it is, a thundering good riot in the next parish was more likely to oil the wheels of charity than the sight of Jack Anvil on his knees in church.²³

Although the catalyst to the insurgency in Barbados had been the deportation of Clement Payne and although Payne had a number of acolytes (which he called ‘his committee’) who helped him organise his meetings, the riots themselves were neither orchestrated nor co-ordinated. They appeared to be spontaneous. But once begun, they were remarkable for the consensus of support which they developed and which continued throughout the 1940s and 1950s in regular strikes and stoppages. In effect, a relatively small percentage of people actively participated in the insurgency, but the ripples of unrest had spread across the island. The fact that riots had taken place was a major shock to the Barbadian system – and more so was the violence of their suppression. The authorities had over-reacted. Police action was brutal and intimidating. Fourteen fatalities – more than those incurred by Jamaica or Trinidad with their far higher populations – were truly shocking. Gwendolyn was a child at the time, in Carrington’s Village, the epicentre of resistance, and recalled how she and her terrified mother were ordered to turn off the light ‘instead of they shoot at the house or whatever’.²⁴ The state violence was random and untargeted. Arthur was a child on his way to school and witnessed the police response: ‘The policeman come up and he shoot’, he recalled,

you see them coming up with guns … I mean, the sight of a gun was no joke. But the policemen shoot … they shoot them, they shoot. And whosoever they could catch, whosoever they caught, they beat them. And shoot them … it was frightening … I saw something happening that I couldn’t understand … and the danger … as a little fella, I was only … about nine. I couldn’t take it in … They were just shooting, you see … you don’t fight guns with a stick … you can’t run a little faster than a bullet.²⁵

‘Fellows come through and shooting down people’, said Eldridge, ‘they come through and shoot him … just shot this old man.’²⁶ ‘Mentally,’ Vernon recalled, ‘it affect me, to see what happen … the danger … people lose their life, and so on, it would affect me. And millions regret … that they live to see such happen when they look on the bodies of some that get shot … and hear the police coming through with guns and firing off at people and so on.’²⁷

For Barbadians, the insurgency and the police response marked the start of a widespread critical evaluation. That most people felt they had been treated unjustly marked a major shift from a local to a national awareness. It was one thing to complain, or loot fields, at a village or plantation level. It was quite another to recognise that you did not act alone. The year 1937 marked the beginnings of a collective condemnation of the injustice of the system and an understanding that poor black people were not powerless. Operating below the colonial radar, signs of resistance could already be detected in domestic organisation, in the rhythms and banter of creole and the secret meanings of language, in faith practices and mutual associations, in songs and folk stories, migration and return, reciprocity and exchange and in the daily adjustments and negotiations which, doggedly Barbadian, balanced out the dominant order – a social consciousness that represented what Réné Depestre termed ‘cultural cimarroneo (cultural hiding away)’.²⁸ As such, they were demonstrations of the agency of poor people in mapping out a life in defiance of their plantation and colonial masters. Now, however, the threat of rebellion – the only language of resistance the authorities could recognise – provided the people with muscle. The authorities were frightened. ‘They couldn’t understand that there was a political uprising. And this was the meaning of the uprising and this is the only thing that could use to bring it to light. Because talking couldn’t bring it to light.’²⁹

Regionally the impact of the insurgency proved seismic. Nothing could or would be the same. It politicised and radicalised many in the Caribbean; it had, as George Lamming was to argue, ‘a direct effect on liberating the imagination and restoring the confidence of men and women in the essential humanity of their simple lives.’³⁰ It was proof positive for others of the need for some measure of self-government in order to secure the appropriate balance of political authority and economic distribution. The riots were the watershed moment in the struggle for independence, and gave support to pre-existing demands for an independent, federated region.³¹

Calls for dominion status via a federation can be traced back to the nineteenth century. It had been advocated by the Imperial Federation League (IFL), launched in Britain 1884 and with a branch in Barbados (and British Guiana). The IFL proposed an Imperial Federation comprising Great Britain and her dominions and in Barbados had some support from the white plantocracy. Federation (without dominion status) had been first proposed by the British Government in 1876 as a way of streamlining the administration of the Eastern Caribbean. Bitterly opposed by a large sector of the House of Assembly and Legislative Council, it had led to major riots in the colony, and the British had been forced to back off. Returning servicemen in the 1920s resurrected the call for regional unity, coupled with demands for greater representation and self-determination, to the extent that in 1922 the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, E. F. L. Wood (later Lord Halifax) was despatched to the West Indies to investigate. He dismissed any idea of federation as impractical due to the ‘centrifugal tendency … and astonishing diversity of … languages, religion and historic tradition.’³² The first meeting of the British Guiana and West Indies Labour Conference in 1926 had also endorsed the idea of a federation. By 1932, the sentiments were such that the British Government sent Sir Charles Fergusson and Sir Charles Orr to examine the possibilities of a limited federation between Trinidad and Tobago and the Windward and Leeward Islands. In order to present a unified West Indian view, a conference was held in Roseau, Dominica, in 1932 of ‘unofficial’ representatives of interested West Indian states, and a draft constitution prepared which provided for elected representation and an extended franchise. Federation, however, was dismissed by the Fergusson and Orr Commission pretty much on the same grounds as Wood had rejected the idea earlier.

Demands for independence had also emerged in the 1920s and 1930s as part of an articulate Marxist critique of Imperialism and as an integral part of Garvey’s pan-African vision. Similarly, individuals such as C. L. R. James³³ and overseas organisations such as the League of Coloured Peoples in Britain, and those established in the United States, were also articulating the case for independence.³⁴ In Trinidad, A. A. Cipriani’s critique of Crown Colony rule led to his advocacy of universal suffrage and effectively regionalised the demands for constitutional reform, inspiring Albert Marryshow in Grenada and Cecil Rawle in Dominica – two of the leading lights in the 1932 Roseau conference – both of whom were strong advocates of West Indian self-government.³⁵

Self-government, however, demanded a constituency and a critical mass. The idea that West Indians shared a common experience of both race and poverty, and now a common response – rioting across the region – were powerful lessons in regional as well as class and racial solidarity. These actions spoke. Whether Garvey’s pan-Africanism or Marxism’s class solidarities, the uniformity of the message as medium was endorsed. Ideas of federation could take hold because they built on pre-existing regional links – migration and miscegenation had already built the foundations of federation. Moreover, the cause of those arrested in the insurgency assumed a transnational dimension as the ex-patriot population in the United States and the United Kingdom were mobilised to assist their defence, and could rely on further support and sympathy from American organisations such as the National Negro Congress. This realisation of commonality provided further fuel for the idea of federation, and the impetus of regional concern and cooperation was maintained in the immediate aftermath of the insurgency, with the holding of the second British Guiana and West Indies Labour Conferences in July 1938 in British Guiana and the third in October 1938 in Port of Spain, attended by delegates from across the region. At this Congress, a draft constitution for a West Indian federal government based on universal suffrage was approved and its platform was adopted by the Trinidad Labour Party and the newly formed Barbados Progressive League. Along with other interested groups, it gave evidence to the Moyne Commission advocating Federation, universal suffrage and Dominion status.³⁶ Federation, it was argued, would provide strength through numbers, a necessary prerequisite for a fully operational dominion. And dominion status would be the gateway to full independence.

Here, however, the issue was more complex: how could a nation be built when the original indigenes were no longer there, when there were no ‘original’ borders to re-appropriate, when there was huge diversity of ethnicities and race? How could the narrative of nation be told when there was neither a nation nor a language to do so, when the social and cultural institutions of nation were lacking, when its inhabitants were dispersed throughout the region and beyond, and had very little commonality, save in the shared – but unspoken – history of slavery? How was it possible to imagine a nation free from dependency on Imperial rule, when it was that very Imperialism which created the geographic and political space it was to occupy? How could a nation be built from an impoverished and demoralised people? Unlike Africa or Asian decolonisation and nation-building, which could trace lineage and history to authenticate an independent future, the West Indies had nowhere to turn, no apparent hinterland of cultural or historical resources to draw upon, or be legitimated by.

At heart, the Moyne Commission considered that West Indians lacked social cohesion and self-restraint, both of which pointed to their lack of citizenship and responsibility. Neither African nor fully ‘British’, neither native nor settler, it was widely assumed that black West Indians had neither culture nor society. Indeed, as the West Indies Royal Commission put it, black West Indians had lost all vestiges of this, for their ‘transfer to the West Indies … did not involve the transfer of any important traces of their traditions and customs, but rather their complete destruction … and no systematic attempt was made to substitute any others’.³⁷ No individual island, nor the archipelago as a collective, could claim in its present state, or in the foreseeable future, responsible citizenship. Compared with the British colonies and dominions elsewhere in Africa and Asia, the West Indies were an anomaly. They were not, nor never had been, ‘nations’, and while a colonised nation ran the risk of whipping up coherent opposition to Imperial rule, as in India, they were also, at the same time, easier administrative propositions. Existing organisation and political structures could be bowdlerised to embed colonial rule – as had happened in Africa, the nearest analogy that the Colonial Office could draw on to understand the West Indies. Yet West Indians were not quite African enough. The region was a conundrum to the colonial mind: artificially made up, it bore no relation to the organic processes which had built nations historically and which afforded them cohesion and stability.³⁸ Somehow, nevertheless, stability, loyalty – citizenship – needed to be restored. The recommendations of the Royal Commission and the endeavours of the Colonial Development and Welfare Act were all geared to engender in the region, island by island, institutions which could help create quiescent, functioning and fiscally solvent states, with a loyal, devoted and law-abiding citizenry. Despots, even benevolent ones, need local, loyal and efficient agents to carry out their business.

It is, therefore, one of the ironies of the West Indies that, from the late 1930s, both West Indians and their metropolitan masters were engaged simultaneously in nation-building projects, albeit with widely different resources and competing agendas – independence and nationhood for one, dependence and citizenship for the other. The drama of the situation was compounded by its geography. The Caribbean lies in the crook of the United States’ embrace. The Monroe doctrine had legitimated American activity in the Hispanic Caribbean and had, with the exception of the Guyanas, enabled it to intervene in almost every country in the Caribbean rim and the Greater Antilles. It had not (so far) intervened directly in the British, French or Dutch West Indies. The insurgency of the 1930s, however, risked infecting the United States with comparable disturbances from its large, black minority which saw itself as an equal victim of white colonisation and which had links to the Caribbean through kinship, and politics.³⁹ Fearing that dissent could be infectious, and braced for the wartime possibility that the United States might need to annex some or all of the region, the Americans appointed their own commission of enquiry, under the chairmanship of Charles Taussig, to investigate the causes of the disturbances and make their recommendations. Peeved though the British were, they had no alternative but to work with the Americans and reluctantly agreed to establish the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission (under the joint chairmanship of Taussig and Stockdale) in 1942, which, the following year, established the Caribbean Research Council ‘to survey needs, determine what research has been done, arrange for dissemination and exchange of results of research … and recommend what further research and co-operation should be undertaken.’⁴⁰

The Second World War had highlighted the region’s strategic importance as a source of oil, bauxite and food, as the eastern gateway to the Panama Canal and the buffer to America’s vulnerable south. The Caribbean was catapulted into a priority position in American foreign policy, much as America itself had been catapulted into the war. The United States was opposed to any form of European imperialism, and a condition of its support for the Allied cause was the right to advocate political autonomy for the region, enshrined in the Atlantic Charter of 1940. It also made no bones about the fact that, if necessary, it would occupy the West Indies. While the British prevaricated and obfuscated, the ending of the war revealed all too clearly that the days of the European empires were numbered.⁴¹ The United States had, moreover, their own agenda for an independent West Indies, linked now inexorably with the Western, American bloc.

From 1947 on, both the British and West Indians were, on the one hand, negotiating the terms of some future independence and, on the other, attempting to build nation states. However, the juggernaut of Empire could not be turned around so fast. Years of colonial neglect had meant that the few institutions which had been put in place were not designed with independence in mind; nor were they designed to transform an impoverished rural proletariat into modern citizens, or to challenge the economic power base of the region, or the oneway channel of economic communications. Britain’s nation-building attempts proved piecemeal and hasty and paid lip service to the needs of the region. All Britain could finally do, when independence came, was to lower the flag and hope for the best. But before it could do that, it attempted to unite the region in a federation. The experiment was launched in 1958 but was formally dissolved in 1962. Thereafter the British tried to salvage federation – any federation – from the wreckage but