Introduction
On the 9 March 1960, just 13 months before Sierra Leone was to become independent, Aaron Emanuel of the United Kingdom’s Colonial Office wrote to the Colonial Governor Sir Maurice Dorman on the question of trained diplomats for the new state:
If Sierra Leone is granted independence in 1961 it is essential that they should be sure to have adequate trained staff to fill the few missions referred to … [in] your letter. An independent state with inadequate overseas representation would make very poor impression on the outside world which takes not a little convincing that the transfer of sovereignty is a reality.Footnote 1
Across Africa, formal decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century saw the (more or less) gradual transfer of power beginning with internal functions of state. Defence and foreign policy were always the last functions to be formally handed over from colonial to postcolonial administrations. The singular importance of control over foreign policy and diplomatic activity lies in their direct underpinning of sovereign power; power that was hitherto wielded by the imperial metropole. Therefore, whereas so-called ‘Africanisation’ often proceeded more gradually (over years) in other sectors of government and business, preparing external affairs for independence was a fraught exercise and one held back until the very last minute, when dates were set for independence.Footnote 2 Diplomatic training was understood by imperial governments as an ambiguous issue in this period immediately pre-independence: it offered the potential for the former metropole to sustain power and influence within a rapidly changing world, whilst at the same time challenging the very foundations of imperialism by empowering the diplomats of soon to be independent African states.
Emanuel’s comments that open this article highlight something at the heart of debates about diplomacy in the lead up to decolonisation – that it was both practically and performatively important.Footnote 3 Diplomats of newly independent states would represent their new polities internationally, making material and symbolic interventions in the international sphere. This paper focuses on diplomatic training as a site for exploring the tensions in late colonialism around sovereignty and self-government. The empirical discussion focuses primarily on the Gold Coast/Ghana, reflecting its crucial position as the first British colony in Africa to gain independence. The final part of the paper broadens out to explore discussions about diplomatic training across African countries that were formerly part of the British Empire, alongside the approach of France to its colonies on the continent.
In what follows, we draw on diverse European and American archival materialsFootnote 4 alongside an oral history interview we conducted with one of the first Gold Coast/Ghana diplomats to receive training from the UK government, as well as a 1969 publication for which many of this cohort were interviewed.Footnote 5 The first part of the article examines early requests from the Gold Coast Government in the years leading up to independence for support with diplomatic training. We then address how later cohorts of Ghanaian diplomats were trained, around and just after independence, and how these diplomats were viewed by the government of independent Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah. Finally, the paper explores how early ad hoc training for African diplomats provided by the British government developed, in response to growing demand and increasing competition from other global powers, into a more formalised programme. We conclude by arguing that diplomatic training can provide a useful lens for understanding the late colonial state. In particular, we demonstrate that training for diplomats provides novel insights into the temporalities, spatialities, and agency that characterised the late colonial state. First, contestations over training provision between former imperial powers and anti-colonial leaders offers valuable insights into the distinct temporalities of the late colonial state in terms of being stuck in limbo, facing demands for speed and requests for slowness. Second, training highlights the diverse geographies of late colonialism, from the multi-scalar connections that characterised the late colonial state, including networks of (anti)colonial and Cold War geopolitics, to the physical spaces of classrooms and study tours where the skills of diplomacy were learned. Third, diplomatic training foregrounds the nature and extent of African agency within the developmental projects of the late colonial state.
The place of diplomacy in the late colonial state
Historians have argued over the power and extent of the colonial state.Footnote 6 Mahmood Mamdani and Crawford Young both highlight its overall force, though with an emphasis on practices of cultural coercion and outright violence respectively, whilst Jeffrey Herbst emphasises the “weak capabilities and modest ambitions of colonial states.”Footnote 7 Where there is more agreement, is in the way that the colonial state attempted – often successfully – to isolate colonised peoples from one another and from the wider world. Most notably, Frederick Cooper has posited the idea of colonial ‘gatekeeper’ states, which had “weak instruments for entering into the social and cultural realm over which they presided, but…stood astride the intersection of the colonial territory and the outside world.”Footnote 8 These dynamics were often magnified as the colonial state approached its terminal point.
In his 1999 article “What Was the Late Colonial State?” John Darwin provided what he called six ‘routes’ to ‘lateness’ – factors that might both differentiate late colonial states from earlier versions of colonial rule and explain why colonial rule came to an end. These included the proactive developmental nature of colonial states after 1945, an increasing drive towards the centralisation and regularisation of power, and concomitant with these aspects, a dense state increasingly enmeshed within “the lush growth of para-political institutions.”Footnote 9 When power seemed to be ebbing, late colonial states often became focused on state security and increasingly utilised violent repression.Footnote 10 Alongside these, and most pertinent for our argument, were two further aspects. First, that those in power – and those seeking to claim it – understood that independence was coming: the late colonial state was a “self-consciously transitional institution bridging ‘real’ colonialism and the coming age of independent statehood.”Footnote 11 And second, that the nature of the colonial state’s external relationships were changing. As Darwin puts it:
The classic colonial state lay in a frozen world with heavy-duty insulation separating it from the heat and light of international diplomacy. Its lines of communication ran to the metropole and back. No foreign power could be represented diplomatically.Footnote 12
However, by the middle of the twentieth century, colonial states were increasingly open to external influences, through war-time mobility, travel for education, and the ideological scramble of the Cold War.Footnote 13 Nevertheless, they remained represented officially only through the metropole.
In this increasingly open ‘bridging’ state, how and when could diplomats be trained? If such training explicitly aimed to further remove this colonial ‘insulation’, to what extent could diplomatic training take place without plugging late colonial states and their soon-to-be leaders into new networks which threatened to short-circuit the power of the metropole? Whilst the late colonial state is known for its interventionist, developmentalist character – training academics, doctors, teachers, civil servants and ‘experts’ of all kinds to fulfil roles in an independent state – training diplomats challenged the foundations of the colonial state itself by raising the question of sovereign independence.
Literature from History and International Relations about colonialism and decolonisation has historically focused on “high politics, strategic rationale and, above all, the decision-making power of politicians and bureaucrats at the imperial centre.”Footnote 14 Even nationalist histories often reinforced this emphasis on political elites.Footnote 15 A more recent wave of scholarship has focused on the ‘experts’ of empire: the professionals on the ground whose knowledge – architectural, agricultural, scientific and educational – materialised the developmentalist policies of the late colonial state.Footnote 16 Whilst still often concentrating on the experiences and contributions of Western ‘experts,’ this literature begins to people the late colonial state with those delivering policy, rather than formulating it. This shift in perspective also provides some space for the contributions of colonised peoples to be recognised, both as crucial intermediaries and as guides with no formal training but myriad expertise, and, later, as a first generation of trained professionals in areas such as planning, agriculture and medicine.Footnote 17
Spaces of professional education and training can provide a useful lens on late colonialism and decolonisation, by bringing to the fore the individual experiences, mobility and agency of (formerly) colonised people, alongside imperial policy, nationalist demands and super-power rivalry.Footnote 18 A particularly productive area has been an examination of international scholarships for students from colonised and formerly colonised countries.Footnote 19 For example, Ngozi Edeagu has demonstrated the value of a prosopographical approach (collective biography) in order to capture the individual and collective experiences of Nigerian students in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 20 In our account, we draw from the strengths of this literature, paying attention to the experiences, motivations and agency of those receiving diplomatic training.
Education and training also lays bare the wider intersections of late colonial and Cold War geopolitics.Footnote 21 The US government and private philanthropic foundations such as Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie - whose aims Inderjeet Parmar argues broadly mirrored those of the State Department - channelled millions of dollars into higher education in Africa seeking to build soft power abroad.Footnote 22 This included international scholarships to bring students from Africa to the U.S. to study, as well as broader cultural and educational programmes on the continent.Footnote 23 In this they competed both with the Soviet Union and with the former colonial powers, such as Britain and France, which also provided large-scale funding for education and training.Footnote 24 Competition therefore both reflected Cold War alliances and cut across them. This ‘cultural assistance’ aimed to create postcolonial elites friendly to East or West, but also, more subtly, to produce epistemic communities that reinforced certain world views. For example, Giles Scott-Smith has shown how, with funding from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundation, the Hague Academy of International Law, in the Netherlands, played a normative role encouraging a transition from empire into a liberal international world order.Footnote 25
Beyond dualistic Cold War competition, recent work has demonstrated the increasing influence of international and regional organisations in the process of decolonisation and postcolonial state-building. Eva-Maria Muschik has convincingly argued that the United Nations (UN) played an important role – through its programs put into practice on the ground by its Secretariat (made up of civil servants) – in the “transformation from a world of empires to one of nominal nation states.”Footnote 26 More than that, these programs shifted the meaning of state-building in late colonial and postcolonial states from “a unique political or historical process” into “a universal technical challenge.”Footnote 27 In a similar vein, Guy Fiti Sinclair has described the UN’s technical assistance in the field of public administration, provided during decolonisation, as a “technology of stateness.”Footnote 28 Whilst until the 1960s many of those delivering this training on behalf of the UN were British, French and American – often, in the first two cases with direct experience in colonial administration – their interests and politics did not necessarily map neatly on to their nationalities.Footnote 29 Nevertheless, their broad technical knowledge and versions of best practice often reflected and reproduced western liberal internationalism, as in other forms of international education, training, and assistance in this period.Footnote 30 Training, and other forms of more mundane bureaucratic experience and practice often overlooked as purely technical, were important in the making and undoing of the late colonial state.Footnote 31
In this rich literature on the intersections of education and empire, decolonisation, and the Cold War, focus has fallen primarily on statebuilding within the borders of late colonial and decolonising states – developing what was known as the ‘manpower’ to run an independent country. But statebuilding also required the training of those who would represent new states externally. Training for diplomats – key actors in the performance and practice of international relations – is only just starting to become an area of academic interest.Footnote 32 This is despite a strong body of literature that demonstrates the crucial contribution of diplomats in decolonisation. For example, in their studies of Algeria, before, during, and after the war of national liberation from France, Alina Sajed, Matthew Connolly and Jeffrey James Byrne have all highlighted the crucial role of international connections including diplomatic linkages.Footnote 33 Connolly describes the war as a ‘diplomatic revolution’ won through securing international support through the work of quasi diplomats working in national capitals rather than through military victories.Footnote 34 Byrne shows how after independence, through its own diplomats, and its hosting of others from the decolonising world, Algeria was positioned as a central player in the emerging ‘third world’ project.Footnote 35 Such insights demonstrate the importance of diplomats both before and after decolonisation, and the extent to which this value was understood by anticolonial leaders at the time.
If diplomats were understood to be key players in representing and influencing the shift from the colonial state to emerging sovereign nation in a postcolonial world, then their training warrants greater scrutiny. In examining early discussions of training for African would-be diplomats, as well as the experiences of those diplomats themselves, in this article we demonstrate how training became a site where the desires, demands and concerns of the late colonial state – and its soon-to-be-citizens and leaders – converged, alongside the interests of the increasingly divided international community. Diplomatic training reflected wider tensions in late colonial state-building and decolonisation, as well as hopes and fears for the postcolonial world. The next section discusses some of these anxieties and expectations through a focus on early requests for training in the Gold Coast, and highlights some of the distinct temporalities of the late colonial state.
‘Premature’ requests or delaying tactics: diplomatic training and timelines for independence
At the end of March, 1953, F.D. Webber of the British Colonial Office wrote to his counterpart in the Foreign Office with the following request:
We have been asked by the Gold Coast Government whether it would be possible for one of their junior officers to be attached to the Foreign Office for a short time at the end of this year to acquire some experience of diplomatic procedure.
He went on to clarify:
The external relations of the Gold Coast are still of course the responsibility of Her Majesty’s Government and insofar as they are dealt with in the Gold Coast it is through a Minister of Defence and External Affairs who is one of the three European officials in an otherwise African cabinet… As the Gold Coast moves towards fully responsible government the Ministry of Defence and External Affairs may be called upon to perform an increased range of quasi-diplomatic duties… The Ministry lack experience in these matters and are conscious of the need for better knowledge of the diplomatic protocol involved.Footnote 36
He concluded by asking whether ‘their man,’ an English Administrative Officer who would be on leave in England later in the year, could spend a month at the Foreign Office to gain experience in the area of diplomatic practice? The Foreign Office replied several months later to say that this was fine, but that a series of interviews with protocol staff, rather than an attachment, might be more appropriate. They sign off, “the usual security checks” will need to have been carried out, and he will be bound by the Official Secrets Act.Footnote 37
By September, however, alarm bells were ringing. J.H.D. Dickson, the Administrative Officer in question had provided a list of questions on behalf of the Gold Coast Government that needed answering. Crucially, these ranged far beyond the relatively safe terrain of protocol and instead focused on the thorny issue of the relationship between sovereignty and representation abroad. As T.B. Williamson of the Colonial Office wrote, in a letter marked “secret and personal:”
Some of the points in the list … went considerably beyond the mere procedural and protocol matters mentioned earlier … and they raised questions which, as you yourself no doubt recognise, in substance concern the progressive transfer of responsibility for the external affairs of the Gold Coast from the U.K government to the Gold Coast Government.’Footnote 38
UK Ministers were at that point discussing constitutional proposals for the Gold Coast and therefore the Colonial Office was wary:
we felt we must be extremely careful about how far we went…. To have turned him loose on the Foreign Office, and still more on the C[ommonwealth] R[elations] O[ffice] or a High Commissioner’s Office in London, with the list of questions which you enclosed might have been very risky, and have led to all sorts of wrong conclusions being drawn here, especially at the present stage of Gold Coast affairs.Footnote 39
Williamson gives the example of Question 5 (‘but one example’ of inappropriate questions): ‘Is it proper for the Gold Coast to have any form of representation in a foreign country before achieving full self-government? If so, what should be the nature of that representation?’ The letter concludes that:
we have talked the matter over with Dickson here, and have asked him to keep the list of questions in his pocket… We realise that once the constitutional instruments are amended and the Gold Coast reaches the final transitional stage before self-government, help may well be needed from the UK Government to prepare the Gold Coast for assuming responsibility for its external affairs, including possibly the training of selected officers of the Gold Coast Public Service for membership of an ultimate Gold Coast Foreign Service. But we think it would be premature to anticipate this by informal enquiries here at the level and in the manner suggested by the enclosure to your letter. Footnote 40
This minor incident highlights something of the thinking of the UK government in the period of late colonialism. Whilst technical training was viewed as relatively unproblematic – focused on issues of protocol and procedure – anything beyond this could be seen as challenging imperial power and questioning the timelines towards full independence. The final line in the letter cited above is telling – a mere four years before decolonisation there was no plan for diplomatic training on the part of the UK government. Indeed requests for support were viewed as threatening and as premature. Prematurity is a key recurring concern in the imperial archives – it crops up regularly in correspondence in this period surrounding diplomatic training and representation.Footnote 41 Moreover, the Colonial Office saw no need for scaling up training responses to reflect the speed of likely decolonisation, confidently stating in 1954 that ‘they could at the moment foresee no further similar requirement in respect of other Colonies beyond the commitments in respect of Malaya and the Gold Coast. Nigeria was likely to be next on the list but this was looking a long way ahead.’Footnote 42
In addition, training itself could be seen as a delaying tactic. Kwame Nkrumah, the anti-colonial nationalist and first leader of independent Ghana, was explicit about this. Richard Akwei, one of the first Gold Coast/Ghana diplomats to receive training from the UK government reflected on this narrative in Nkrumah’s campaigning discourse:
His message to the people was, well, what are you fighting for? Independence? What are you waiting for? … [The more gradualist anglophile nationalist] leaders, they say we want to have the good civil service, a good hospital, a good legal institution, this and this and this, all the modern infrastructure of the modern state before independence, which was reasonable. I mean, they were persuasive, because we didn’t have many qualified people at the time. But [Nkrumah’s] message to the earlier leaders was: ‘Why are you wasting time asking for people to be trained to man engineering departments, medical departments, legal departments, what do you want? Political independence! So seek ye first political independence and all other things will be added to unto you.’Footnote 43
There were then, distinct temporalities at work in the late colonial state. Training could be perceived as threatening to the late colonial state, and requests as hurrying independence. But the need for training could also be a way of stretching out the timelines of decolonisation, and therefore challenged by anti-colonial leaders. Delaying, waiting, and hurrying prematurely, these were the temporalities experienced and put to work in the late colonial state.
Placing the first diplomacy trainees
Whilst requests for training were viewed as premature in 1953, by 1955, plans were afoot to train the first cohort of diplomats for independent Ghana. The first group, including Ebenezer Moses Debrah, Alex Quaison-Sackey, and Richard Akwei, were drawn from the senior administrative civil service in the Gold Coast. According to Scott Thompson, who interviewed many of them for his 1969 book Ghana’s Foreign Policy, they were “among the country’s most worldly and sophisticated men.” This implied that they were educated to a high level within British and colonial institutions; many had already been to university in London, Oxford and Aberdeen even prior to travelling to the UK for diplomatic training. Discussing the selection process, Richard Akwei noted that he was recruited by Amishadai Larson Adu, who had been his former House Master at Achimota School in Accra, a prestigious establishment modelled on British public schools (Adu was himself first a colonial administrator and later a senior international civil servant for independent Ghana). This method of recruitment underlines again the close relationship between the British colonial state, its spaces of education, and the first generation of Ghanaian diplomats.Footnote 44
The UK training in 1955-1956 included courses undertaken at the London School of Economics (LSE), alongside placements with UK Embassies and High Commissions. Whilst it is not clear why the LSE was chosen, significant factors might have included its central London location, close to the Foreign, Commonwealth Relations, and Colonial Offices, and Commonwealth High Commissions, and its new International Relations department, led by the young, dynamic Geoffrey Goodwin.
The LSE courses were theoretical and Western oriented. For example, in the 1960-61 course bibliography there are very few authors from the global south listed: two works by the Indian diplomat K.M. Panikkar, and the Caribbean economist Arthur Lewis (listed alongside Walt Rostow of Modernization Theory fame), in the section on “problems of economic development.”Footnote 45 Although there was no sense of overt political inculcation or meddling within the course, one member of the first cohort of trainees recalled that they were left with the message that “they [the British] were good - and we were not to forget this.”Footnote 46 As Scott Thompson notes, whatever trainees felt about the specific training, “These men, then, were heirs to the Western tradition in diplomacy.”Footnote 47
Nevertheless, the trainees’ time in London did have a political impact unforeseen by those providing the course, coinciding as it did with the Suez crisis. As Thompson documents, “One said that if he had lacked consciousness as an African, or Afro-Asian before this, he did not after. Another said that ‘It became clear during Suez that the British would go to any lengths to protect their interests; thus we had to make clear we would use every weapon we had to protect ours.’”Footnote 48
As with many political leaders and students from the British Empire, the UK was not a new place for many of the first diplomatic trainees from Ghana and beyond. The setting for training in London was familiar and offered opportunities for sociability, as well as political networking and activism.Footnote 49 It also opened up the trainees to the racism of British society, most explicitly through the informal colour bar still at play in many hospitality venues, housing, and in the discrimination and victimisation of the police.Footnote 50 Imperial capitals could be hostile places for diplomats in training.Footnote 51
The placements in British embassies that followed the university course were also a matter of contention. Lengthy deliberations between Whitehall officers about the perceived risks of accommodating these African cadres demonstrated the enduring racial logics that still held in this late imperial moment. First, despite the express wishes of the Gold Coast Government, the idea of sending an African trainee to the British Embassy in Washington was resisted by British diplomats, given the ‘social difficulty’ they might encounter due to the colour bar on the one hand, and the possibility that they might spread anti-British propaganda on the other.Footnote 52 This situation became increasingly untenable given plans for other (white) diplomats from Africa to be offered placements in Washington. Highlighting both the overt racism of the Colonial Office, and a keen awareness of how this would be received in Africa, the British Ambassador to the U.S. Sir Roger Makins was warned that “It will be difficult to sustain the position that we are willing to have a Counsellor attached to your Embassy from the Central African Federation but not willing to deal similarly with a blackamoor from the Gold Coast.”Footnote 53 Meanwhile an attachment to the Monrovia embassy was partly refused on the (rather patronizing) grounds that it was:
not large enough to provide any worthwhile experience for Gold Coast trainees. There might also be political objections, either because the Liberians tried to corrupt the trainees’ British allegiance or on the other hand because the Liberians showed their jealousy of an emergent Gold Coast.Footnote 54
In September 1954, an interdepartmental meeting agreed that trainees should be placed in politically ‘safe’ missions such as in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and “posts in the Iron Curtain and NATO countries and newly independent countries,” and “posts where a colour bar existed or there was a notoriously smart society” - one critical of the UK - should be avoided.Footnote 55 These deliberations had taken months, delaying the placements of these Gold Coast cadets to late 1956, after they had spent their year studying at the LSE from 1955.
Having completed a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford, followed by experience in the Gold Coast Civil Service, Richard Akwei was in his 30s by the time he was selected for diplomatic training and was allowed to skip the LSE course. Instead, he proceeded directly to an attachment at the British High Commission in Ottawa for around nine months in 1955-6, for what he described as a ‘crash course’. Akwei reflected on this experience:
They were very, very nice, very helpful. I was attached to different sections of the High Commission to expose me to what I would likely face as a diplomat for Ghana. And so I was in the political section, in the economic section, in the protocol section, all under the guidance of these officers of the embassy… I was already in the senior public service of Ghana, so much of the training was similar to what I was experiencing in Ghana. So it wasn’t very difficult. The subject matter changed. The nuances changed, what diplomats were expected to do, and what was advisable for them to do and how they would meet situations and what your function was, which is to represent your country, but particularly the president, and your foreign minister, and then to write memos, and even study memos which have come into the mission, and which had gone out of the mission and I was even taken into the telex room … to give me an understanding of what they did.Footnote 56
Akwei was also given “the literature on diplomacy to read’ including retired British diplomat Ernest Satow’s classic A Guide to Diplomatic Practice – “it was like the bible” - first published in 1917.Footnote 57 Whilst Akwei had gained some understanding of diplomacy during his undergraduate degree, this reading was more practical, focusing on diplomatic skills with a strong emphasis on protocol. This version of protocol prioritised Western diplomatic performances, and little space was afforded to questioning them. Reflecting on his training attachment in Canada in a recent interview, Akwei noted that:
[when] we went to dinner parties, we observed more or less the Western style. There were not many African nations in Ottawa in those days. In fact, I don’t recall even socialising with any African departments…the texts, recommendation on protocol was there, but it was based on European [ideas]. It was later, when we were actual diplomats for Ghana, that I discovered that protocol was more or less what is acceptable to your government.Footnote 58
In the Ghanaian case, this included embracing of Kente cloth as national dress, as part of a knowing diplomatic performance of Ghanaian-ness and difference from the West, which became as Akwei remembered “a source of attraction.”Footnote 59 Akwei’s official portrait for the Ghanaian Permanent Mission to the United Nations, where he served from 1967 until 1972, shows him in national dress (Figure 1).
Richard Akwei representing Ghana at the United Nations. https://www.ghanamissionun.org/past-ambassadors/ (courtesy of Richard Akwei)
Overall, Akwei concluded, “the training was necessary. I found it was necessary. Because it first exposed you to what you were likely to confront in the outside world after independence of any country.”Footnote 60 Diplomatic training offered valuable technical know-how with which to engage with the international community. Knowing how to perform in the international arena, dominated by Western and colonial voices, was important, even if these performances could later on be challenged and amended to assert alternative visions for the world.Footnote 61
Despite – or in fact because of – their training, this first group of Ghanaian diplomatic trainees were viewed with suspicion by Kwame Nkrumah. Drawn from a colonial elite favoured and promoted by the British colonial administration, this group were perceived as not sharing the pan-African and radical anti-colonial ideologies or experience of the new leader. Nkrumah considered the civil service “absolutely British in substance and nature.”Footnote 62 Richard Akwei described these dynamics, whilst not associating himself with them directly:
the [Colonial] administration preferred to deal with the earlier politicians who are more anglophile than Nkrumah. Nkrumah had the American background, the American style, and he was maybe not as elegant as the former leaders. The former leaders were professional men. Very British, well dressed, well spoken, they wrote beautiful memos. And they could hold their own with the British who were in charge. But their method was gradualism.Footnote 63
Nkrumah was focused on achieving full political and economic independence for Ghana, beyond the formal transfer of power, and as such, was suspicious of the continuing influence of the UK.Footnote 64 He viewed institutions like the civil service, alongside universities and multinational corporations, as “part of the apparatus of imperialism… which had to be decolonised.”Footnote 65 Nkrumah was also suspicious of the practice of studying abroad, which he felt could strip African students of their local connections and critical awareness of their own position. Drawing on his own experience of education in the US and the UK, he argued that “The colonial student can be so seduced by [the Western philosophies] … that he surrenders his whole personality to them. When he does this, he loses sight of the fundamental social fact that he is a colonial subject.”Footnote 66 Reflecting these wider suspicions of studying abroad, and of British influence in particular, in the late 1950s, Ghana made much less use of the UK diplomatic training opportunities than Malaya, despite becoming independent in the same year. As Alec Clutterbuck of the Commonwealth Relations Office noted: “This is partly political (Ghana tends to turn rather deliberately away from a good many of the activities she pursued in her Colonial days).”Footnote 67
The professional diplomats trained in London would initially miss out on the most prestigious and important roles as, reflecting these suspicions, before independence in 1957, Nkrumah’s government announced that all “ambassadors are appointed by the party in power and are therefore political appointees.”Footnote 68 However, whilst in other arenas – such as the Bureau of African Affairs - Nkrumah pursued a more radical international agenda supporting liberation movements across AfricaFootnote 69 - his government retained a Foreign Service with diplomats working within international norms, rather than rejecting the Western diplomatic system altogether, and many of those trained at the LSE went on to take senior roles within this.
Training took would-be diplomats from Ghana and across Africa to spaces familiar to many in the colonial elite of the late colonial state: the educational spaces of London and Oxford. These spaces characterised this period of the developmental colonial state and they helped to both constitute it and hasten its ending, as they contributed to the opening up of colonies to wider global networks, and to the imagining of independent futures.Footnote 70 Moreover, these training spaces provided the rationale for the continuation of colonial rule (the need to create an education elite ready to run an independent state), whilst simultaneously providing some of the connections through which decolonisation could be hastened. In this sense, these spaces of education were a part of two of Darwin’s “routes to lateness,”Footnote 71 being a part of the developmental state (albeit in the metropole), and helping to prise open the late colonial state to other influences through the connections of studying and attachments in London and other capitals. The next section will explore how diplomatic training provided a route to support and influence from other world powers beyond the former imperial power.
‘A political act in the first magnitude’:Footnote 72 Competing to train diplomats
Despite Nkrumah’s reservations about overseas diplomatic training, by the end of the 1950s there was, across Africa, an increasing demand for training, reflecting the speed and success of the independence movements. What began as ad hoc, individual responses – such as to the request of the junior officer from Gold Coast in 1953 – became slowly more codified. By the late 1950s the UK government could offer that colonial diplomats-in-training join the Foreign Office/Commonwealth Relations Office training it held for its own British recruits for a month every September; be assigned overseas attachments to British or other Commonwealth Missions abroad; or undertake ad hoc protocol training, especially aimed at those “responsible for ceremonial arrangements for the celebration of their countries’ Independence, and thereafter for protocol matters.”Footnote 73 They could also undertake special language training, or a course at the LSE, as the first cohort of Ghanaian diplomats had done, or at Oxford or Cambridge on adapted versions of the courses previously aimed at British colonial administrators.Footnote 74 For training courses and attachments, trainees were encouraged to bring their wives if possible, because of what the Colonial Office called “the importance of the wife’s role in the social, representational side of diplomatic life.”Footnote 75 Diplomats themselves were assumed to be men, though occasionally women did come for training.
This menu of options was developed in large part in response to competition from elsewhere. Nervousness about competition is a recurring theme in the correspondence between British officials in this period and reflects broader concerns about geopolitical positioning in the period of late colonialism, decolonisation and the Cold War.Footnote 76 America with its ‘high pressure salesmanship’ was seen as the largest threat,Footnote 77 but there were other more concerning competitors too. For example, F.M. Thomas, a colonial officer writing from Zambia just before independence in 1964 noted that:
In my previous letter I wrote about the stage reached with our Foreign Service Training, and asked that the Department of Technical Co-operation might treat our requests for assistance as a matter of urgency and priority. I said the hawks were gathering, and that there was a grave danger, in view of the pressures being put upon our Ministers, that they would be driven to abandon their natural inclination to obtain staff and training from Britain… Delays such as this on the part of H[er]. M[ajesty’s]. G[overnment]., however good the reasons, only open the door to others (such people as Loft of the African-American Institute, for instance) to say nothing of the Israelis, the Yugoslavs, the Poles, the Czechs and the Egyptians, all of whom have had emissaries here recently and who are thus in a position to force Kaunda into accepting more help from them, in default of British help, than he really wishes to take.Footnote 78
Whilst the letter writer downplayed the agency of Kenneth Kaunda, independent Zambia’s first leader, this account nevertheless illustrates concerns over a loss of influence through competition from other states offering ‘help.’ Diplomatic training was viewed as a valuable source of soft power, and part of a global reordering in the wake of decolonisation and the Cold War. Leaders like Kaunda, meanwhile, could play on the anxieties of competing global powers to extract an improved training offer and diversify their countries’ sources of foreign aid.Footnote 79 Zambia’s first diplomats trained in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and Tanzania, while Zambia also hosted a regional training seminar in Lusaka upon independence in the autumn of 1964. This training was funded by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, delivered by LSE staff, and attracted trainees from across Southern and East Africa, demonstrating the diversity of the provision and sources of funding leveraged.Footnote 80
Competition could also potentially threaten the timelines of decolonisation as envisaged by the late colonial state. The U.S. was often seen as meddling by the colonial powers, in ways that might hasten decolonisation. According to Joseph Johnson, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he made sure not to mention his organisation’s ‘Program for Diplomats’ to any British or French colonial officers as he toured Africa in early 1959: “I just had the feeling that this would not be a good idea.”Footnote 81 This plan for diplomatic training, developed with the State Department’s knowledge, pre-empted independence in a way that threatened the power of the late colonial state.
French diplomatic records from 1960, when the Carnegie programmeFootnote 82 began to recruit participants, indeed convey a sense of alarm at this ‘foreign intervention’ in France’s communauté, and a certain amount of surprise that independent governments would accept training other than that offered by France.Footnote 83 At a high-level meeting in early 1961, French bureaucrats agreed that “if we want to avoid one day having to abandon the training of African diplomats to foreign interventions like that of the Carnegie Endowment, we must have at our disposal a university-like organisation up to the task”.Footnote 84 The solution was to bring in a 14-month, formal programme of diplomatic training at the Institut des Hautes Etudes d’Outre-Mer (IHEOM) at considerable expense.Footnote 85
Later the same year, while the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) were still fighting a bitter war of liberation against France, the Carnegie Endowment admitted two of its members to its training course on diplomacy. This was controversial, as one Carnegie board member cautioned:
for an American foundation to support FLN candidates just at the time when extremely difficult negotiations are under way between the FLN and the French government, would be precisely the kind of endorsement the FLN has wanted to receive from the US, and the kind of blow France has been afraid of receiving from her main ally. It is […] a political act of the first magnitude.Footnote 86
However, the other Carnegie board members justified the move partly in terms of gaining a competitive advantage in the context of the Cold War:
we recognized that this action would have beneficial consequences with respect to future conduct of Endowment Programs in Diplomacy vis-a-vis Africa and other ‘neutralist’ governments.Footnote 87
What is clear, then, is that diplomatic training under late colonialism was viewed as a valuable soft power resource jealously guarded by imperial powers, but increasingly claimed by states achieving independence, and other international actors. This training was thus an important but often overlooked part of a global reordering in the wake of decolonisation and the ongoing Cold War. However, the effects of training provision were unpredictable, and offered opportunities to both former colonising and decolonising states, as well as individuals making their way in international politics during this transformational period. In doing so, it provided another route to the openness of the late colonial state described by Darwin.Footnote 88
Conclusion
What, then, does a focus on diplomatic training tell us about the late colonial state? In a way it tells us a familiar story – of uncertainty, of unknown timelines, of ad hoc, short-term thinking – in a way that helps to disrupt the narrative of smooth and orderly transition promulgated by colonial apologists. Diplomatic training reflected and magnified wider trends. It was part of late colonial statebuilding but because of its sensitive nature – it provided the means for late colonial subjects to perform independence on an international stage, as well as leading to security concerns and worries over foreign and especially socialist influences – these ambiguities and contradictions were further amplified.
This paper has demonstrated how a focus on diplomatic training provides new insights into the temporalities, spatialities, and (restricted) agency of the late colonial state. First, as the analysis above has demonstrated, the discussions by British actors in the Colonial Office and allied departments, as well as in colonial capitals, demonstrated the tensions and anxieties of the late colonial state, looking forward, nervously, to independence and furiously trying to maintain some measure of control. In some ways education and training provided a reason for the extension of timelines for independence - the late colonial state as developmental state - though at the same time it unsettled these timelines and sped them up. This contributes to the theorisation of the late colonial state by highlighting the specific temporalities that dominated it: waiting, demands for speed, requests for slowness.Footnote 89 These temporalities were experienced by colonial citizens, nationalist leaders, colonial administrators, and diplomatic trainees. Politicians like Nkrumah deliberately harnessed these frustrations over slowness and demanded urgency – independence now, training later. Training – beyond the diplomatic – is a unique category through which this temporality was experienced, and through which it can be studied.
Second, diplomatic training draws attention to the multi-scalar connections of the late colonial state. It provides another avenue through which to understand the increasing openness of colonies heading towards independence – the variety of new global networks, anticolonial, pan-African, but also dominated by the ideological struggles of the Cold War. Diplomatic training armed new diplomats with some of the technical skills and recognition needed to plug their newly independent countries into the formal international sphere, from which colonial governments had, increasingly ineffectively, aimed to keep them insulated. Late colonial diplomatic training was assuredly ‘technical’ but inherently political. Just as new histories of development in this era are demonstrating how questions of technical assistance and ‘manpower’ are anything but dry and neutral, despite their labels,Footnote 90 so too diplomatic training should be understood as a key site within which colonial and neo-colonial competition for power during and after decolonisation can be assessed.
Beyond this though, specific spaces dominated colonial subjects’ experiences of the late colonial state. Darwin’s account of the late colonial state is not attentive to these spaces in which colonialism was enacted, experienced and challenged, despite these being central to many of the routes he describes. What spaces were created by, and in turn constituted the developmental state, the open state, the security state? What was the geography of the late colonial state in and beyond the borders of the colony? Diplomatic training – alongside other forms of education and training – provided the physical spaces – in classrooms, attachments, study tours and the informal spaces in between – for connections to be made, and agency asserted, reproducing and challenging the broader politics of late colonialism. Training often took place in the European capitals of soon-to-be former empires. Whilst academic discussions of the late colonial state often remain rooted in the institutions of government, it was frequently experienced in spaces of higher education and training in both the colonies and Europe.Footnote 91 A focus on training provides new spaces to think about the experience of late colonialism and expands the geographies of the late colonial state to also include the imperial capitals in Europe as well as newer destinations for education such as the US.
Third, much work on the late colonial state – including our own – relies substantially on the records of the colonisers. The concerns of the UK Colonial Office and their officials come through clearly in the archives recording the discussions and debates about the nature, value, and dangers of training. But a focus on the training itself and how it was valued by those African diplomats who participated also makes space to examine the nature and extent of African agency within the late colonial state. Trainees did not passively accept the knowledge imparted, sometimes viewing it as useful technical know-how, other times dismissing it - passively by failing to attend, or more actively by criticising the course or refusing to sit exams. Some failed to take their studies seriously, whilst others fundamentally challenged their tutors’ prior perceptions. And whilst states on both sides of the Cold War competed for students and influence, individuals and soon-to-be-independent African states made strategic decisions, hoovering up as much training as they felt useful, often paying less attention to the venue and its ideology than to the skills and prestige that the training might impart.Footnote 92 Many of the anxieties recorded in the British colonial archives reflect the increasing agency of those who would lead the newly independent states.
Late colonial states were brought to an end, and new states made to emerge, through the labour of many – including diplomats and diplomats in training. As Bérénice Guyot-Réchard has recently noted, “diplomacy in the context of decolonization entailed intense political, emotional and intellectual labour, and this labour shaped foreign policy.”Footnote 93 Diplomats played a key role in decolonisation and in “worldmaking after empire,” therefore diplomatic training provides a useful window through which to understand one of the influences on their practice, and to recentre the agency of Africans in bringing to an end the late colonial state.Footnote 94 John Darwin’s ‘routes’ to the ‘lateness’ of the late colonial state provide a good starting point for theorising this period, but his and others characterisations of this era do not explore the specific temporalities and spatialities that characterised and constituted late colonialism.Footnote 95 Diplomatic training provides a useful lens through which to examine more carefully these dynamics, and in doing so, to bring to light the agency of the elite African political class who dominated after independence.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Ambassador Richard Akwei, Ambassador Akua Sekyiwaa Ahenkora, the Foreign Service Institute of Ghana and the Association of Former Foreign Service Officers of Ghana, and the trainers who facilitated this research and spoke to us about their experiences. Thanks also go to Tim Livsey and Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo who brought together this special issue and provided constructive feedback on earlier drafts, and to the journal editors.
Funding information
This project was funded by a Leverhulme Research Project Grant: RPG-2021-044. The project was approved by King's College London's ethics process and there are no conflicts of interest.
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