Introduction
This article is a contribution to the history of the British cultural project during the late empire and to the rhetoric of late colonialism. In the decade between the end of the Second World War and the first independence of an African colony under the United Kingdom’s rule (the Gold Coast which became Ghana in 1957), British colonial policy alternated between two types of rhetoric: it sought to find a new source of legitimacy for the colonial Empire, while preparing the transition to independence by substituting authority and physical presence with influence in order to maintain a prominent role in the post-colonial states. As Sarah Stockwell points out, “the idea of substituting influence for control – a transition from formal to informal empire – is a recurrent and established trope in the historiography of British decolonization.”Footnote 1 This article builds on this historiography in inquiring how the long-term aim of securing influence at the formal end of the Empire was also built through a cultural project, via the inculcation of British values, models, and traditions – so-called Britishness or the British way of life.Footnote 2 In the opinion of the Colonial Office the propagation of the British way of life aimed at improving and strengthening the links between Great Britain and the colonial populations, while at the same time pursuing the long-term objective of persuading the colonial populations to maintain their association with the British Commonwealth once they achieved political independence.
The Colonial Office’s efforts to promote the British way of life were therefore not just pragmatic measures to secure influence at the end of empire, but part of a broader imperial discourse in which identity itself was constructed and contested. As Stuart Ward has argued, Britishness was never simply a domestic identity contained within the United Kingdom; it derived much of its meaning from imperial relationships and the projection of British values overseas.Footnote 3 Situating the Colonial Office’s cultural policies within this framework highlights how Britishness functioned simultaneously as a political tool and as a global idea, one whose resonance depended on how it was imagined in Britain and negotiated within the colonial space. Therefore, the colonial empire was central to what Britishness meant. It encompassed how Britain imagined itself in relation to its empire, and how those in the colonies adopted, adapted, resisted, or discarded that identity. Ward argues that Britishness carried with it promises of civility, progress, rule of law, British justice, constitutional freedoms, the civic side of the identity.Footnote 4 But these promises were often in tension with imperial practice, with colonial violence, racial hierarchy, and the suppression of dissent. As empire declined, the gap between promise and reality became harder to sustain.Footnote 5
The tension between the idealised civic promises of Britishness and the realities of imperial rule opens the way to examine how identity was actively shaped, managed, and disseminated through cultural policy. One strand of this effort was the deliberate promotion of a British way of life, framed both as a model of values and traditions and as a means of consolidating influence within colonial societies. Moving from the abstract contradictions of Britishness to the institutional and discursive strategies through which it was materialised, this article examines the British way of life as a cultural tool in post-war colonial politics. It focuses on two central agents of this project – Colonial Office publications and the British Council – while also interrogating the complexity of identity categories in colonial contexts where diverse populations coexisted. This raises crucial questions: was there an ‘approved’ version of Britishness designated for Africa, and what kind of Britishness was promoted to different segments of colonial society?
Colonial Office publications addressed the aims and themes of reaffirming the legitimacy of the British colonial Empire in an era of decolonisation, but also the strategy of exporting Britishness which consisted of the enactment of a variety of educational tools to project British colonial policy and its discourse in the colonial territories, the most important being the educational films produced by the Colonial Film Unit. These films played an important role in propagating a ‘benevolent colonial policy’ based on the concepts of development and partnership. While the colonial films have been studied in depth,Footnote 6 the publications produced by the Colonial Office have not been the object of significant academic attention.Footnote 7 Nevertheless, these publications are worth analysing as they were a vehicle of transmission of the British way of life that was made available in the British Council’s reading rooms and social centres in the colonies. The first part of the article delves into Today, an illustrated magazine produced by the Colonial Office for a colonial audience, and a series of booklets on the Democratic Way of Life. The second part of the article explores the relationship between the Colonial Office and the British Council in the colonies and finally, the third part examines the work of the British Council in East Africa, particularly in Kenya.
Recent literature has investigated the British Council’s role and work in the colonies,Footnote 8 but as highlighted by Caroline Ritter in her book on the British cultural relations in Africa, the continent received few mentions before her monograph.Footnote 9 With a focus on the period between the 1930s and the 1980s, Ritter explores the importance of cultural institutions (the British Council, the BBC and Oxford University Press) and products, such as theatre performances, broadcasting, and English-language textbooks as tools of empire and post-empire building. This article builds on and expand Ritter’s rich work contributing in particularly to the history of the British Council in Africa, shedding light on the work of the institution in East Africa, particularly in Kenya, and its collaboration with the Colonial Office in promoting the British way of life.
The promotion of the British way of life through Colonial Office publications
Publications produced by the Colonial Office, including the magazine Today and the Democratic Way of Life booklet series, functioned as key instruments in disseminating the British way of life, while also offering important insights into the thematic frameworks that underpinned it, and showing a very clear continuity with the propaganda strategies developed during the Second World War, including those disseminated through British Council publications.Footnote 10
Today was an illustrated magazine created for colonial audiences and circulated throughout the Empire. The magazine emerged from the Colonial Office’s initiative to replace War in Pictures, a magazine designed to support the British war effort during the Second World War. It was initiated and produced by the Colonial Office and published by the Central Office of Information, it was issued every six weeks from 1946 to 1957, amounting to eighty-seven editions in total. Published in English, Hausa, and Swahili, Today functioned as a propaganda vehicle to disseminate British colonial narratives across all colonial territories.Footnote 11 The initial print run in 1946 was 63,650 copies, which was later expanded and stabilized at 100,000 copies by 1952.Footnote 12 In terms of distribution, Today circulated across the entirety of the British colonial empire. The circulation list for 1949-1950 reveals that the largest numbers of copies were directed to territories either moving rapidly toward self-government, such as Nigeria (18,000 copies) and the Gold Coast (6,000 copies), or experiencing acute political unrest, including Kenya (7,800 copies) and British Malaya (7,000 copies).Footnote 13 This relatively high circulation compared to other territories reflects the Colonial Office’s assessment of where propaganda was most urgently required. In both categories of colonies, those on the path to constitutional reform and those marked by internal crisis, the propagation of the British way of life, served as a strategic tool to influence political developments and reinforce imperial legitimacy. Visually oriented, the magazine featured a high proportion of images – largely photographs from different colonial regions, but also from Great Britain – accompanied by short, accessible texts intended for readers with basic levels of education. Each issue was typically structured into seven recurring sections that articulated Today’s editorial policy.Footnote 14 From these, two overarching themes can be identified: firstly, Britain’s role in advancing progress and development in the colonies; and secondly, the representations of Britain and the desire to give an accurate picture to the colonial audience of the British Way of Life, as well as to show the interest of the British public for the colonies. The analysis of the photo-reportages contained in Today, make it possible to investigate the promotion of the British way of life rhetoric in the colonies, and to highlight the different themes which composed the British late colonial strategy. The goals of Today were threefold and clearly expressed by the Colonial Office: the magazine was designed for the broad purpose of making the British contribution to colonial progress better known in the colonies; to awaken an appreciation of the advantages which derived from membership of the British Commonwealth; and finally, to introduce instructive features which would have direct application to colonial problems.Footnote 15
In the field of exporting Britishness, Today complemented the existence of a printed series entitled Democratic Way of Life, composed of nine booklets which were in turn summarized and explained in the booklet This Realm. Some Aspects of the British Way of Life.Footnote 16 Conceptualized by the Colonial Office, although its authors remain unknown, and published by the Central Office of Information between 1950 and 1955, the series was intended to give the colonial public an insight into life in Britain. As for Today, the series was made available in the social centres in the colonies and the British Council’s reading rooms. Although not explicitly stated, the nature of these publications, rich in textual content but, generally devoid of images apart from This Realm, suggests that they were aimed at the more educated fringe of the colonial population. Unlike Today, which was characterized by illustrated reports and a pragmatic approach, the publications in this series were built as thematic essays on different topics.
The foundations of the British way of life are clearly stated in the 1952 booklet This Realm. Some Aspects of the British Way of Life named after an extract from Shakespeare’s Richard II:
The British way of life has been built up by a long history of fighting for social justice, the rights of the individual, and a solid background of reference for free will rather than compulsion. […] It has taken centuries for the British way of life as we know it to evolve, and this evolution is still going on. It is, in fact, this constant evolution which is the essential vitality of the British way of life, the very rock upon which it stands. […] The whole fabric of British society is made up of many diverse units, customs, historic usages, bodies and organizations. In the remaining chapters we will watch these things in action and will see just what we mean by the ‘British way of life.’Footnote 17
As for the themes developed by these Colonial Office publications, the desire to maintain influence emerges transversally in all Today issues and the themes can be played into two broad categories: institution-building and political development, the British approach to work and leisure activities in the metropole. The first theme to emerge is institution-building and the process of political development in the colonies, which was a constant in the discourse of late colonialism. This theme is carried out through the export of the Westminster model, the “mother of all parliaments,” a democratic, liberal, and parliamentary political system that should serve as an example for political institutions in the colonies as they moved towards self-government. Moreover, this model is presented in the magazine through two perspectives: the political life and institutions in Great Britain, for example, through an election day in the metropole;Footnote 18 and their gradual establishment in the colonies. The articles and images devoted to the colonies deal with political and constitutional achievements in African and Asian territories and illustrate the political participation of local populations through elections, the organization of constitutional conferences and local governments. The use of this theme had a dual purpose: firstly, to build a social and political consensus around the British government’s colonial policy of transition to self-government; and secondly, to show that the peoples of the Colonial Empire were making considerable and tangible progress towards the stage of self-government. Several articles present progress “towards self-government” in the colonies of Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Ceylon, British Malaya, and the West Indies.Footnote 19 This, as observed, was taking place under the supervision of the British government and the Colonial Office in particular. In the same vein, the account on the Gold Coast’s general elections in February 1951, the first since the new constitution came into force in the same year, underlines the colony’s progress towards self-government. In the images, one notes the similarity between this report and the one dedicated election day in Britain: in both cases, the voters, the polling stations, and the wait for the results are depicted, symbolically marking the export of the Westminster model to the colonies.Footnote 20
Secondly, the British way of life is represented in the magazine through the exploitation of two related subjects: the British at work; the British approach to problems in the fields of health and agriculture, and their resolution. Except for two articles on freedom of religion and freedom under the law,Footnote 21 the magazine’s use of the British way of life is based on concrete examples drawn from the daily lives of people in the metropole. An attentive analysis of all the magazine’s issues shows that, in their coverage of British people at work, the magazine’s editors chose to depict workers mainly from the primary and secondary sectors.Footnote 22 This choice was intended to show people enjoying working with their own hands, and to export to the colonies a culture of manual labour, already evoked by Arthur Creech Jones, then Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, during his one month trip to British East Africa in July-August 1946.Footnote 23 As for the British approach to problems in the fields of health and agriculture, we can see that Today’s editors valued the figure of the British expert, represented by articles as a “district nurse” and the “agricultural district officer.” As shown by Joseph Hodge, British colonial administrations in the twentieth century increasingly turned to scientific and technical expertise, particularly in agriculture, as the foundation for governing and developing colonial societies. The expert became central to the exercise of colonial power. Rather than relying only on political authority or coercion, Britain legitimated its imperial presence through claims of scientific rationality, professional knowledge, and technical capacity.Footnote 24 In the report on the nurse, who is active both in the city and in the rural areas of the metropole, the importance of her role in the task of “helping the population to achieve and understand the need for a high standard of hygiene in the home as a protection against disease” is emphasized.Footnote 25 The short article accompanying the images of an agronomist describes him in these terms: “Always welcome by British farmers, he is well received because his knowledge and skills help the farmer to improve his crops and livestock breeding. For this reason, farmers are always ready to ask his advice when they encounter problems and difficulties in their work”.Footnote 26 In a magazine designed for a colonial audience, the valuation of British expertise served a dual purpose: on the one hand, in the short term, the mobilization of this theme aimed to educate colonized populations to seek and accept help from British experts on the spot; on the other, in the long term, this expertise enabled the British to maintain influence at the end of formal colonization. As highlighted by Joseph Hodge, the “triumph of the expert” did not end with decolonisation. Instead, it laid the groundwork for the post-colonial global development regime. The structures, practices, and assumptions of colonial expertise were carried forward into international development institutions and policies.Footnote 27
Finally, the third theme chosen to represent the British way of life in colonial territories concerned activities organized in the metropole that “have, or could have, their counterpart in the colonies.”Footnote 28 A relevant example here is provided by reports promoting and presenting the activities of “community centres” in British towns.Footnote 29 These are presented in the magazine as places for meeting and sharing. The promotion of these centres in the colonies was part of the policy of the Colonial Office and the Social Services Departments of the colonial governments, as well as that of the British Council. In the colonial territories, these centres aimed at encouraging socialization between the different communities, and to increase reciprocal knowledge and understanding which, the Colonial Office hoped, would, in the long-term, result in the new states remaining part of the Commonwealth after independence.
The various themes of the British way of life, already presented in Today, were broadened in the Democratic Way of Life books, which were in turn summarized in the booklet This Realm. Some Aspects of the British Way of Life. The fifteen chapters that structure the book cover subjects ranging from the British Parliamentary system to the British responsibility for dependent people.Footnote 30 Each chapter highlights an aspect of British character and explores the rights (such as freedom of speech and of worship, a fair trial, and social security), duties (payment of taxes, enrolment in the defence services) and leisure (sports and arts) of the British people. Each thematic chapter represents a piece of the global narrative on the British way of life promoted by the Colonial Office to the colonial public. Through publications as Today magazine and the Democratic way of life booklets, the Colonial Office advocated the adaptation of the colonial populations to a specific political, social and cultural model in order to create irreversible ties to Britain.
The British Council: promoting the British way of life in the colonies
In addition to publications, the British government promoted the British way of life in the colonies through the British Council. Studying its collaboration with the Colonial Office shows how it was a fundamental tool in the promotion of the British way of life in the colonies. For the Colonial Office, the propagation of the British way of life was intended to improve and strengthen ties between Great Britain and the colonial populations. This approach was not only short-term, but also long-term, going beyond formal colonization. The establishment of good relations between the British and the colonial populations was considered indispensable to encourage newly independent states to join the British Commonwealth. A second and more immediate goal was more globally embedded in the context of the Cold War: countering Communist propaganda and the “Communist way of life.”Footnote 31
The British Committee for Relations with Other Countries was created by the Foreign Office in 1934, subsequently renamed the British Council in 1936. According to the British scholar of media history and propaganda Philip M. Taylor British scholar of media history and propaganda Philip M. Taylor, the British Council was a paragovernmental, semi-official organization, and not simply an arm of the government.Footnote 32 Its mission was to counter the negative propaganda of the Axis powers and to promote a better understanding of Britain and the English language abroad, as well as to develop closer cultural relations between the United Kingdom and other countries. The first overseas offices opened in 1938 in Portugal, Egypt, and Poland and in 1940 the organization was granted a royal charter in which its mission was enshrined.Footnote 33
The collaboration between the Colonial Office and the British Council began during the Second World War. Present in Malta since 1939, the British Council extended its activities to other British Overseas Territories in 1940, namely Cyprus, Aden, and Palestine. The raison d’être for this enlargement was the need for Great Britain to assert and strengthen its influence in the Mediterranean region and the Middle East.Footnote 34 Although presented as an offshoot of the British Council’s work abroad and not as a foray into colonial affairs, this presence in the territories under the Colonial Office’s responsibility inevitably brought the organization into contact with the Ministry. It is significant that the chairman of the British Council, Lord Lloyd, was appointed Secretary of State for the Colonies by Winston Churchill in the 1940. Following the Colonial Office narrative:
It soon become clear to us [the CO] that the organization and technique of the Council could very valuably be used in the Colonial territories generally, not for the original purpose of countering foreign propaganda, but for the positive purpose of promoting friendship with and understanding of Britain amongst the Colonial Peoples, in order that the new nations which were coming into being should be firmly linked to Britain by sharing in her traditions and culture.Footnote 35
To put an end to the overlap and confusion concerning the spheres of action of the Colonial Office, colonial governments, and the British Council, informal collaboration in the colonial territories was clarified after the end of the Second World War with the British Council becoming an agent of the Colonial Office. The latter was “responsible for determining policy, the territories in which activities were undertaken and the relative distribution of effort between the different territories,” and also “for indicating to the Council the methods and channels to be used.”Footnote 36 In August 1948, the British Council’s work in the colonies was officially set out in a detailed memorandum which stipulated its objectives and the range of work to be carried out, as well as its terms and conditions.Footnote 37 The organization performed functions in colonial territories different from those carried out in foreign countries. In the colonies, it was not responsible for the cultural and educational progress of its inhabitants, except for the limited purpose of showing them the British way of life. In fact, the cultural improvement of colonial populations and the promotion of their cultural relations with Britain were the sole responsibility of the Secretary of State for the Colonies and the colonial governments.Footnote 38 For all these reasons, the British Council’s mission in the colonies was defined by the Colonial Office as follows: “the carrying on of any activity in the cultural and educational sphere of which the chief purpose is the ‘projection’ of the British way of life and the promotion of closer relations in cultural matters between the people of Britain and the people of the Colonies.”Footnote 39
The British way of life was to be promoted by the British Council through cultural and educational activities aimed primarily at an adult, educated public. These activities took place mainly at the British Council’s local headquarters, the Council Centres, and aimed to stimulate interest in British culture, ideas and ideals through discussions, theatre performances, exhibitions, film screenings, lectures and concerts. Furthermore, they were meant to encourage the participation of local communities, both European settlers and colonised peoples, many of whom had visited or studied in Britain. In the Colonial Office’s strategy, the involvement and cooperation of local communities served a dual purpose: on the one hand, it dispelled suspicions of propaganda on the part of the British Council’s activities; on the other, it provided an opportunity to encourage the “intermingling of races”:Footnote 40 the improvement of relations between different ethnic groups. Alongside the promotion of these activities, the British Council centres offered a small library and reading room, open to the public and where publications and periodicals like Today could be consulted. The Colonial Office memorandum stressed that magazines were in great demand in the colonies, and that a well-considered choice of them could play a very useful role in the pursuit of the organization’s objectives.Footnote 41
As for the Council’s geographical scope of action, it was defined in a circular signed by Charles J. Jeffries, Deputy Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, and addressed to colonial governors on 28 November 1949. Jeffries established a threefold classification of the colonies, based on their political context and the internal stability of the territory. The first category included colonies where the work of the British Council was considered “essential and of immediate importance” and was subdivided into three types of colonies: those with internal political problems (Kenya, British Malaya, Cyprus); those advancing rapidly to the stage of self-government (Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Jamaica, Trinidad) and those subject to strong communist propaganda (Singapore, British Malaya, Hong Kong). The second category consisted of territories where the organisation’s work was perceived as “essential but not of immediate importance” and included colonies where the coexistence of different communities was deemed to cause long term political problems, such as Sierra Leone, Uganda, Nyasaland, Nord Rhodesia, Sarawak, Nord Borneo, Malta, British Guyana, Fiji and Tanganyika. Finally, the third category concerned colonies which had strong relations with Britain and were not considered susceptible to anti-British influence and where the work of the British Council was thus qualified as “desirable but not so essential,” such as Gambia, Aden, Gibraltar, Barbados, and the Windward and Leeward Islands.Footnote 42 While there is no detailed information on the establishment of this categorization, it was not unanimously accepted by the various governors, who were not always satisfied with the category chosen for their territory. The circular served a dual function: on the one hand, it emphasized that the Colonial Office was responsible for the policy and funding of the British Council’s work in the colonies, and explained why it attached such great importance to the organization’s activities in these territories; on the other, it sought the Governors’ advice on the ideal form the organization should take in the territories they administered in order to win their support.Footnote 43 To explore the question of the British Council’s work in the promotion of the British way of life in a colonial context, it is worth choosing a specific case study from Jeffries’ categorization and examining it in detail. The case of Kenya stands out for several reasons.
“[Not] to play Beethoven to the Masai”:Footnote 44 British Council work in Kenya
Kenya fell into Jeffries’s first category, for which the British Council’s work was considered “essential and of immediate importance.” In 1949, the year of Jeffries’ report, Kenya experienced internal political problems, determined by very tense “race relations” between the various communities. The colony was home to a large community of white settlers and Indians, which had led to a large-scale alienation of land belonging to African populations.Footnote 45 According to Joanna Lewis, the land problem in Kenya was determined by a racist approach based on the conception of the limited capacities of the African farmer due to his “primitive nature.” For Lewis, this negative view of the Africans’ abilities was at the source of white paternalism in East Africa.Footnote 46 At the end of the Second World War, the British were faced with the dilemma of making political concessions to Africans while supporting white settler communities. In this context, the work of the British Council was deemed to play a very important role in improving relations between the communities and thus contribute to the stability of the country, which was considered by the Colonial Office an essential factor for political progress.
British Council representation in East Africa was established in 1947 as the outcome of several factors. The post-war political and social context of the East African territories, the positive attitude of the region’s governors, and the report submitted by Malcolm Guthrie – Senior lecturer of Bantu Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London – to the British Council and consequently to the Colonial Office, all contributed to the decision to set up the office. Between November 1942 and 1943, Malcolm Guthrie travelled throughout the British territories of East Africa (Uganda, Tanganyika and Kenya) to explore the possibility of establishing British Council activities in the region and wrote a report containing the results of his investigation.Footnote 47 In the first part of the report, Guthrie explained the various factors that needed to be taken into consideration when planning the organization’s presence in East Africa. The first factor was the ethnic diversity of the region’s inhabitants. The population was composed of an African majority, estimated at over ten million people, with varying socio-economic conditions and levels of education. Additionally, there were large Arab and Indian communities and a small European community. The latter was composed of several categories of people: contract workers with no particular interest in the future of the region, rentiers, retirees attracted by low taxation and cheap labour, and settlers. In highlighting the multi-racial nature of the region, Guthrie identified key elements who were deemed to be considered in the establishment of the work of the British Council. Although a minority, the Europeans were the dominant and ruling ethnic group. According to Guthrie’s analysis the settlers and the rentiers represented the major obstacle to the development of the British Council’s activities, given their “distorted view of their own importance.” Moreover, in many cases, “they were so convinced of their superiority, [that of the British], that they would consider it unworthy to explain and transmit their culture to the race to which their many servants belonged.”Footnote 48 Europeans clearly identified themselves as an elite because of their racial and cultural origins and did not want to share the privilege of Europeanness/Britishness with those they considered to be “lesser races.”
Guthrie points out that there were no social ties between the four ethnic groups, which made the establishment of the British Council even more essential in order to create cross-community relations through cultural activities. As underlined in the second part of the report, this analysis applied especially to Kenya, described by Guthrie as the territory which “presents more difficult problems than anywhere else I visited.”Footnote 49 The complexity of Kenya’s ethnic division, the presence of a vast settler population and the tensions created by the alienation of native lands and discrimination against Africans made Guthrie recommend the creation of two British Council institutes, one in Mombasa and the other in Kisumu, which were cities located outside the White Highlands.Footnote 50
The second factor highlighted by Guthrie was education. He repeatedly criticized the “utilitarian perception of education” of the African population. According to his interpretation, education was approached solely as a means to increase economic well-being. Similarly, the English language was studied because it was the language of the ruling class, and not as a tool for discovering British culture or the British way of life. The latter approach would, to his mind, improve understanding of the British point of view, thereby enabling the African population to understand that the actions of Europeans did not stem from the “inexplicable conduct of the white races” but from the “rationality that underlies the majority of British actions.”Footnote 51 For Guthrie this conception was a clear sign of the need to extend the Council’s educational and cultural activities to the East African territories. Moreover, the author was also concerned with the “spread and absorption of Western culture” in urban centres. Given the rapid growth of cities, it was important that Africans were exposed to the widest possible range of British culture, so that they would absorb the “best of the British way of life.” Additionally, the spread of Western culture would turn Africans away from “an often-distorted image of the European,” which Guthrie illustrates through this paternalistic example:
The African can only imitate what he sees, and while it is clear to us that what he does see is only a small part of British culture, it is not so to him. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the sum total of the British culture as it is understood by most Africans is the wearing of tie and trousers, and the belonging to the club.Footnote 52
Moreover, Guthrie’s vision was also about control: it sought to impose an idealised version of the British way of life in Africa while positioning British authorities as the sole legitimate agents of its promotion. It is worth noting that in spite of the importance accorded to education in his report, this domain would not be taken over by the British Council in colonial territories but would remain a prerogative of the colonial state under the supervision of the Colonial Office.
Guthrie’s report was received with interest at the Colonial Office and contributed to the decision to set up a British Council office for East Africa. The chosen representative was Richard A. Frost, who arrived in Mombasa on 23 March 1947.Footnote 53 In a report written in 1955, summarizing his eight years in East Africa, Frost recounts that by the time he left London he had received only two sort of instructions: firstly, to set up a cultural centre in Nairobi that was accessible to all communities in the colony in order to improve “race relations and thus create a calmer and more cooperative atmosphere for political discussion and for the general development of Kenya;” secondly, to investigate what kind of activities the British Council could set up in the region.Footnote 54 Frost points out that he had the freedom – within the limits of the Secretary of State’s definition of the Council’s policy in the colonies – to develop initiatives according to his own judgment. He wrote:
It was essential to have a clear idea of the Council’s aims and purposes. These were not, as ignorant critics declared, to play Beethoven to the Masai or to try to persuade European farmers to have their garden boys into their drawing rooms for tea. They were simple and based on common sense. As the African people become better educated and reach higher economic standards of living and positions of greater responsibility should be accompanied by an understanding of British culture in its widest implications, a knowledge of all the aspects of British life and achievements on which development in the colonies is so largely based.Footnote 55
Frost spent the first two years in East Africa studying the local context, overcoming the mistrust of the leaders of the various communities, and laying the foundations for the future Kenya Cultural Institute, an interracial institution dear to Creech Jones which opened in 1952.Footnote 56 Frost soon realized that the British Council’s aim of improving race relations between the various communities, while welcomed by Africans, Indians and Arabs, was being hampered by the mistrust of the European population. The latter saw the British Council as a tool of the British government aimed at undermining the position of European farmers and settlers in the colonial society to the benefit of Africans. Against this backdrop, it became clear to the representative that improving race relations could not be achieved through inter-community socialization in the Council’s centres. Therefore, Frost turned to itinerant activities – such as lectures, films projections and poetry readings - in places where groups of English-speaking people were present.Footnote 57 In terms of locations, Frost’s tours in the early months of his mandate showed that in every region there were audiences likely to be interested in the British Council’s activities. Given the vastness of the territory and the limited number of staff available – Frost himself and an assistant – he decided to concentrate his efforts on groups of educated Africans through activities in colleges and on African teacher training schools, in order to best spread knowledge of Britain and the British way of life. According to Frost’s reasoning, this audience was the most likely to exert a major influence on the rest of the population.
Frost’s report highlights the duality of the British Council’s mission in the East African territories. The institution’s work focused not only on the African population, but also on the European one, especially in Kenya, promoting two different and adapted models of the British way of life.Footnote 58 Through cultural programs aimed at individuals or groups of people, the British Council sought to win the trust and cooperation of members of the European community for the purpose of achieving better inter-racial relations. Furthermore, the spreading of the British way of life therefore also applied to settlers as Frost noted: “the ways of life and thought of the European population should be truly British and that basic British qualities should not be forgotten, as unfortunately is inclined to happen.”Footnote 59 In practice, the Council’s activities aimed at European schools and adults in farming areas was channelled through poetry and music recitals, and the loan of plays to drama societies and of gramophone records to music societies. As for the Africans, Council programmes were largely concerned with agriculture, local government and other practical aspects of the British way of life “on which social and administrative progress of the Africans was based.”Footnote 60
The question of “race relations” in the British Council’s work in East Africa was also at the core of the choice of the future representatives and collaborators. The report on the British Council’s work in East Africa, written by the Director of Information Services at the Colonial Office, Kenneth Blackburne, during his visit in the spring of 1949, reveals several interesting points resulting from meetings with the territories’ governors and members of their governments and administrations.Footnote 61 At the heart of the concerns expressed in the interviews was the subject of “race relations” between the Europeans and the other ethnic groups. Frost’s work provoked several criticisms both from official and non-official sections of the European population who thought that he went “rather too far in his efforts to provide social contacts between Europeans and Africans.”Footnote 62 In this context, the choice of the future representatives was deemed crucial.Footnote 63 Blackburne insisted that “the Council Representatives must not regard themselves as missionaries sent out to educate stiff-necked Europeans and downtrodden Africans in race relations.”Footnote 64 Moreover, he underlined that active cooperation between the representatives and the colonial government was essential to avoid damaging the organization’s activities and reputation, and above all, British colonial policy.
The Emergency
The period of the “Emergency” offers an additional insight into the work of the British Council. Following the Mau Mau revolt in 1952, the Kenyan colonial government declared a State of Emergency.Footnote 65 The reports written by Frost in 1953 analysed the African population’s opinion of the Mau Mau and the context in which the British Council’s work had to evolve.Footnote 66 These reports were shared with the Controller of Overseas Division and with the Chairman of the British Council, as well as the Governor of Kenya.Footnote 67 The first report, written on 30 January, narrates the effects of the revolt in Nyanza province (north-east Kenya).Footnote 68 Frost reflects on the population’s perception of the rebellion. According to his survey, the illiterate part of the population did not have an opinion and was ready to follow the line of the community leaders. For this reason, Frost stressed the importance of considering the point of view of the educated or semi-educated part of the population, which followed the Mau Mau uprising with interest. This position was determined by the failure of Africans demands for better living conditions and an improvement in their situation through constitutional and peaceful means. It was reinforced, after the declaration of the state of emergency, by the mass incarceration of African leaders who were detained for weeks without being charged, before being released with a clean record. According to Frost, this treatment was interpreted as a form of intimidation of the educated fringe of the African population by the police and the army, compounded by the fear of the establishment of an apartheid regime like the one in place in South Africa since 1949. The result was a growing resentment of the colonial administration and admiration for the actions of the Mau Mau.Footnote 69
Frost’s second report was written in April following a three-week tour of Nyeri and the Fort Hall Kikuyu reserve.Footnote 70 After describing and condemning the violence and brutality committed by the police and army, supported by the Kikuyu Home Guard, Frost draws attention to the fact that the segment of the African population that was loyal to the government, often of Christian faith, lived in fear due to the violence of the uprising and its repression.
Frost’s reports clearly set out the context in which the British Council’s work was to be carried out during the Emergency. He points out that in this context, more than ever, the British Council’s task was to work towards an understanding of the British way of life, British achievements and British standards.Footnote 71 His analysis of the position of the different sections of the African population led him to advocate for the concentration of the institution’s efforts on the most educated groups. Following his experience in Nyeri, Frost wrote to the new governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, proposing initiatives applicable to the “Emergency” context.Footnote 72 The Council representative suggested setting up three-day courses in the reserves, which aimed at giving the inhabitants a general understanding and appreciation of country life in Great Britain, through films and talks, and thus contribute to improving the context on the reserves to facilitate the work of the colonial administration. A letter sent by Frost to the Vice-Governor, Sir Frederick Crawford, at the end of March 1954, provides an overview of the activities undertaken. Frost describes his work in the Nyeri Reserve, which he had already visited in 1953, and the activities carried out at the Athi River detention camp:
At the beginning of March I gave a talk illustrated by films to about 50 of the best educated of the detainees who have shown willingness to co-operate with the authorities. My idea was to run a series of talks dealing with life in Britain and I started with a talk explaining how in any country which is progressing towards higher standards of life, a time comes when people must choose between life on the land and life in the towns. The question made possible many useful references to the development of Kenya and I tried to show how problems which may seem to them to be purely local have been faced by Britain and other countries during the course of their development.Footnote 73
At the end of his letter, Frost relates that in his successive visits to Athi River, he was also able to speak with a group of “resisters,” Mau Mau militants who refused any kind of cooperation. Through the sessions with this type of inmate, the camp commander hoped to “provoke a crack in their resistance and raise doubts in their minds about their struggle, through which it would be possible to educate them constructively.”Footnote 74 Frost informed Crawford that the outcome of these sessions was positive, and that on successive visits he had noticed an increase in voluntary participation from this category of inmate. The British Council’s work in detention camps was complementary to that carried out officially by the Kenyan government through community development programs, which suggests British Council complicity in the colonial violence perpetrated in Kenya and efforts to “rehabilitate” detainees.Footnote 75
As far as the limits and achievements of the British Council’s work in Kenya are concerned, a report sent to the Colonial Office in the summer of 1952 provides an initial, generally positive assessment:
It is doubtful whether the British Council has any appreciable effect on the leaders of European or Asian public opinion. […] It is, however, effective in reaching a proportion of educated Africans and African school children of secondary standard and above. It also makes a very real contribution to the improvement of race relations by arranging for members of different races, and particularly the better educated Africans, to meet each other. […] Every effort should be made to expand the extremely effective system of visits [of influential Colonial people] to the United Kingdom for Africans and Arabs which are arranged by the British Council.Footnote 76
Nevertheless, it is pointed out that the British Council’s effectiveness was limited by shortages of staff and funds, as well as by a dispersal of efforts and sometimes by the language barrier. This assessment was completed by the handing-over notes of Richard A. Frost to his successor in May 1955 and a report written by R. A. Phillips, Director of the Colonial Department at the British Council, after a trip to East Africa in March-May 1955.Footnote 77 Phillips, reporting on conversations during his travels, noted that Frost’s work was praised within the African community, albeit with less enthusiasm in Uganda and Tanganyika. This was due to the political situation complicated by the Mau Mau revolt, which had a negative impact on relations between the African and European communities in all the British East African territories. Phillips also highlighted the growth of British Council centres in Kenya: in addition to the Nairobi office, in 1950 offices were opened in Mombasa and Kisumu, managed by a team of six people, four of whom were based in Nairobi. The centres in Mombasa, the largest in East Africa, and Kisumu were equipped with a library and a reading room opened to people from all communities. For these reasons, in the conclusions to his report Phillips recommended continuing to work with different communities: on the one hand, to continue to improve understanding and appreciation of the British way of life in the African, Indian and Arab communities; on the other, to preserve the British cultural heritage of European community and promote a more liberal attitude towards other communities. Phillips’s recommendations were subsequently adopted by A. Ross, who succeeded Frost as British Council representative. Ross’s work largely continued along the same trajectory, with the notable exception of policies concerning the reserves as, even though the state of Emergency persisted until 1960, the Mau Mau insurgency had effectively been suppressed by the end of 1956.Footnote 78
The Kenyan case therefore highlights not only the centrality of race relations in shaping the British Council’s agenda, but also the extent to which the export of Britishness was entangled with the wider contradictions of colonial rule. The Council sought both to familiarise educated Africans with a carefully curated version of the British way of life and to remind European settlers of their “true” Britishness, in order to maintain imperial cohesion. In practice, however, its work exposed the limits of cultural diplomacy: the enduring suspicion of settlers, the volatile politics of race relations, and the colonial administration’s reliance on coercion during the Emergency all curtailed its ambitions.
Conclusion
In the late colonial period, the British way of life was projected as both a set of values and a lived model of identity, deployed to legitimize imperial authority while preparing the ground for a post-colonial Commonwealth. The Colonial Office sought to present Britishness as civic, democratic, and progressive, a cultural inheritance worth preserving even as political power shifted towards independence. The promotion of British values, traditions, and social and political models served a dual purpose: it was instrumental in improving and strengthening the links between Britain and colonial populations, while seeking to safeguard ties and a degree of influence in the post-independence era. Through Colonial Office publications and the work of the British Council, the British way of life was reframed as a universal ideal of order, civility, and social advancement, an identity to be emulated and ultimately used to anchor future relations between Britain and its former colonies. Yet, the British way of life was never a neutral or uncontested category. As highlighted by the Kenya case study, its civic promises of justice, equality, and freedom coexisted uneasily with the realities of racial hierarchy, coercion, and colonial violence. This dissonance between rhetoric and practice highlights how Britishness was as much a political strategy as a cultural identity, shaped by imperial needs and constantly adapted to shifting historical circumstances. As for the theme of the European identities in Africa, the analysis of the East African/Kenyan case highlights three arguments: firstly, promoting the British way of life was also promoting a very specific form of Britishness, a state-controlled and “approved” version of what Britishness was and should be in Africa; secondly, while the members of African, Indian, and Arab communities were open to the British way of life for the advantages it might bring them – an utilitarian view that Guthrie criticised in his report– the European community disliked and criticized the promotion of the British way of life to Africans; finally, the British Council’s work promoted two different models of the British way of life, one adapted to the European population and the other to the African one.
The attempt to export the British way of life in the twilight years of empire underscores its central role in redefining Britain’s global presence after 1945. Far from being a purely domestic construct, Britishness was forged in the crucible of empire, sustained through cultural policy, and projected abroad as a tool of soft power. In this sense, the cultural project of British late colonialism reveals both the persistence and fragility of Britishness: it could mobilize loyalty and admiration, but it also exposed the limits of imperial authority in a world moving irreversibly toward decolonization.
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