Decolonization and the end of the Empire in Africa have been extensively explored by historians mostly through the lenses of Cold War and Development. Since the late twentieth century, several historians have examined the roles of Africans in the politics of the end of the British Empire in Africa. Much of the existing literature focuses on the roles of African actors such as the nationalists, students, youth, women, nationalist movements, and labor unions in decolonization during the late twentieth century. Fredrick Cooper's classic, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (1996) is one among this body of work. Away from the human actors, and protests of labor and nationalist movements in Africa, Rosalind Coffey has offered a nuanced insight into the study of decolonization by centering the role of the British press and its cultural impact on decolonization, drawing several imperial case studies from Ghana, Kenya, the Congo, Zimbabwe, and Malawi through the already familiar themes of colonial violence and resistance, independence and freedom, and neo-colonialism.
According to Coffey, “the British newspaper coverage informed the British public and political context of decolonization to a great extent than previous accounts have acknowledged” (14). Coffey argues that newspapers and opinion articles in Britain shaped local perceptions of British imperialism and decolonization in Africa, with a major influence on the British and imperial policies including the socio-political and cultural lives of Africa, Africans, and European African settlers. Unlike popular literature that posits African nationalists as strategic mobilizers against imperialism through anticolonial protest and nationalist movements, Coffey counterintuitively argues that it was the press that shaped the strategy for decolonization among African activists, liberal whites, the white-settler communities, and the first postcolonial governments across Africa who interacted with the press to set postcolonial state agendas and the press, in turn, shaped political processes and outcomes in Britain and the African colonies.
By placing the press at the center of the decolonization narrative, Coffey contends that the events leading to the end of the empire in Africa were multifaceted—a coalescence of local factors simultaneously from the metropole and periphery. He argued that although the process leading to the independence of colonial Africa predated the 1940s, it was in the aftermath of World War Two that colonial resistance snowballed into struggles for self-rule, and the press was strategic to its actualization across former British dependencies in Africa. Coffey notes that the wave of anticolonialism and struggles for self-rule post-World War Two was paternalistic and partly a result of the poor socio-economic state of both Europe and Africa which saw many political actors and white liberals in the metropole supporting several political parties, opposition voices, and pan-Africanist groups advocating socio-political reforms and inclusionary policies in Africa under colonial rule and early years of independence. The emphasis on postwar transnational solidarity demonstrates how unfettered capitalism impacted the socio-political choices of a class of the British public and African subjects towards the end of the British Empire in Africa. The icing is Coffey's interpretation of decolonization moments as varied processes in which colonies with little or no white population attained independence rapidly, unlike the white settler colonies, juxtaposing the colonial experience in the British colonies in West and Southern Africa.
The book consists of seven chapters with an introduction and conclusion, rooted in archival materials such as government documents and newspapers, individual papers, records of political groups, and secondary sources. In chapter 2, Coffey examines decolonization in Ghana and how right-wing press reportage complicated post-independence relations between Britain and Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah. Here, Coffey notes that the postwar ideological binary—capitalism versus communism—shaped journalistic reportage and political outcomes in Africa, with each journalist pitching their reports to groups that leaned towards the right-wing or left-wing ideology. This was obvious in the British journalists’ negative depiction of Nkrumah as a dictator, following the political disagreement between his breakaway political party, Convention People's Party from the United Gold Coast Convention, his former party during colonial rule, which ruffled the Ashanti intelligentsia who had earlier disagreed with Nkrumah on the possible structures of government during the decolonization debate. The right-leaning journalists’ negative depiction of Ghana's independence and its first president in The Mail and The Express newspapers, according to Coffey, strained the relationship between Britain and its former Gold Coast colony, which further complicated British-envisioned commonwealth solidarity as the British press painted Nkrumah as a dictator and portrayed Ghana as a weak postcolonial state.
The third chapter examines the cases of colonial violence in Kenya and Nyasaland and how the press complicated British-African relations through their depiction of the Mau Mau war in ways that contradicted the reality of the Kikuyu. While the left-wing newspapers sided ideologically with the Kikuyu fighters who took up arms against the dispossession of their indigenous lands by the white settlers in connivance with their traditional chiefs who benefitted from colonial rule, the conservative right-wing newspapers presented the Kikuyu fighters as rebels against colonial order. The contradiction of the press reportage was clear in the Hola massacre that claimed the lives of many Africans in Nyasaland but was underreported by the British press. On the strength of these analyses, Coffey argues that the limited coverage of colonial violence aligned with the official objectives of the Kenyan government to conceal the atrocities committed against the Kikuyus in the international system.
Chapters 4 and 5 are mutually linked as they examine the popular visit of the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, and his classic “Wind of Change” (117) speech in South Africa and its implications for racial relations between white settlers’ minority and the Black majority under apartheid rule. However, the Sharpeville massacre provides evidence of a strategic alliance between British correspondents, white liberals, and African activists. But, as Coffey notes, the alliance could not spur reforms because of the material strength and swiftness of the national government to repel possible threats from such an alliance. The sixth and last original chapter examines post-independence crisis in the Congo under the country's first Prime Minister and how the British press glossed over the role of the British government. Like the Ghana case, the British press presented Congo under Patrice Lumumba as a weak post-colonial state without recourse to Western Allied interests and the United Nations’ complicity in the crisis.
Coffey concludes that British newspapers complicated decolonization and British policies in Africa as African groups who sought reforms and change saw the press as a veritable platform to challenge colonial order because of the sympathy of certain white-liberal correspondents to the cause of freedom and political reforms in Africa. Overall, Coffey's textual interpretations of British newspapers and the adoption of the press as a tool of analysis for rethinking decolonization and the end of the empire in Africa challenges the dominant binary—Cold War politics and colonial development—with which many historians have examined this critical episode in the history of the British Empire in Africa.
