Since 1988 a goodly slice of the Great and the Good of British civil, political and media society, from the current Prime Minister downwards, have been getting letters and press releases from Mr Harold Smith. Smith’s letters have served as a kind of substitute for the non-publication of his memoir Sons of Oxford. Commissioned in 1986 by the late Graeme C. Greene, the book got lost in the shuffle when the publishing house Jonathan Cape changed hands.
An Oxford graduate from a working class background, Smith picked up the Fabian version of the white man’s burden concept and went to Nigeria in the early 1950s for the Colonial Office. Working in the Labour Ministry, he drafted some of Nigeria’s labour and factory legislation. His memoir is a fascinating insight into the underbelly of British colonial administration. Smith not only describes the sexual and political exploitation of the black Africans, his is the first such memoir I have seen in which the covert world is shown to play a significant part in colonial life. Smith portrays MI5 working with the Colonial Office, bugging, tapping, intercepting mail — as well as producing inept anti-communist propaganda. Then as independence loomed, the Colonial Office/MI5 team were replaced by the Foreign Office/MI6 people.
Smith’s encounter with colonial corruption climaxes with his discovery that among his duties was election rigging for the British.
‘I had been ordered during the first stage of the Independence Elections at State (Regional) Level in 1956 to take all Department of Labour Headquarters staff and vehicles to campaign for allies of the key politician who was the British government’s No.1 political henchman, Festus Okotie Eboh, the most corrupt Nigerian politician. My senior officer, Charles Bunker, had orders to obtain, by pressure and harassment if necessary, free cars, petrol and huge donations from large multi-nationals for the British-backed Northern Peoples’ Congress and its allies in the South….. the Governor General confirmed that the order I had received to rig the elections was from him personally. He said I was the only senior British civil servant to refuse to take part in the covert operation. I had minuted under his order, “No, sir. This would be a criminal act.”‘
A mild sort of social democrat member of the Labour Party, Smith complained to head office when he was next in London. Head Office threatened to kill him, but settled for destroying his career — hence Smith pictured working as a clerk at a labour exchange in 1959. He also brought back with him as a souvenir from his last trip an obscure, wasting, tropical disease, which he has to this day. Noting the presence in Nigeria of an outpost of the British biological warfare centre at Porton Down — presumably out there doing tests on the black Africans — Smith now wonders if he was poisoned by the British state.
Despite his complaints the Brits went ahead anyway and duly rigged the elections, suppressed a census of the population of the northern region which would have revealed what a minority the northerners were, and handed power over to their stooges in the North. A model example of ‘successful decolonisation.’
In the press release quoted above, Smith wrote,
‘That the British felt most at home in the backward North was common knowledge. The Hausa/Fulani chiefs were almost feudal and cared little for the welfare of the Northern peasant and, if it were possible, some of the British officials cared rather less. The hard-working progressive British administrators in the South loathed the Northern District Officers and often referred to them as as “polo-playing pricks”. The Northern white sahibs retaliated by calling the white officials of the South, who were forever building schools and dispensaries, “nigger lovers”.
‘In this topsy turvy world of secret intelligence reports, MI5, pimps, prostitutes, rape and murder, presided over by the Colonial Office and Harold Macmillan, it was not surprising that the Nigerian political leader of great personal integrity and honesty — Awolowo — who based his party machine on the Conservative Party and was a devout Christian and believer in British fair play would soon after Independence find himself not in the President’s or Prime Minister’s office but rotting in a small prison cell.’
Smith’s account of the election-rigging is the missing link in the received account of the period which begins with Nigerian independence and ends with the Biafran War. The entry on that subject in the Encyclopedia of Modern History begins ‘Nigeria achieved independence in 1960 with a federal system of government dominated by the most backward region, the north…’. ‘With a system’ — as though that system were some kind of natural feature, not one created by the out-going colonial administration Smith’s account explains how and why this happened
Rigging the elections in 1956 and 1960 led to the Biafran War as the Ibos rebelled against domination by the British stooges in the North. Continuing British neo-colonial control of Nigeria can be priced in bodies: perhaps two million dead during the Biafran War. Little wonder that nobody wanted to know about Smith’s experience until recently.
In July 1988 chunks of his story were published in those notorious radical weeklies, the Wiltshire Times (July 15, 22 and 29 July), the Chippenham News (15 July) and the Oxford Mail (September 1). These pieces, in turn, were spotted and reported on by the UK Press Gazette of August 15. Jonathan Aitken MP, now a junior Defence Minister, wrote in a letter to Smith that the Wiltshire Times articles showed ‘a marvellous example of the abuse of secrecy in our country.’
Some day somebody will publish Smith’s memoir. In the meantime Smith has been seeding academic libraries and institutes with a version on IBM compatible 3.5 inch disks.
I would print Smith’s address and phone number, but some of the British neo-fascist right are collecting and circulating lists of ‘targets’ for abusive phone-calls (and worse). So contact him via Lobster. Smith’s story, which I have only sketched in here, is a bomb waiting to go off under the British state.
Notes
- Secret Africa: British Treachery and Phoney Independence, press release, September 1991.
- In the estimable Anthony Verrier, for example, we find this: ‘Critics of Colonial Office policy for Nigeria had always said that officials favoured the north, because of its superior culture, ability to produce good soldiers, and the cordial feelings of its rulers towards most things British. By contrast, the assorted tribes of the other regions were said to be regarded by Sanders of the River and his like as a bunch of money-grubbing traders or, on a more charitable view, simple sambos who had to be told what to do.’Verrier thus captures in one sentence the racism and contempt for work which characterises the English ruling class. Through the Looking Glass, Anthony Verrier, (Macmillan, London, 1983), pp. 266/7.
- Sons of Oxford, unpublished ms, 1993 edition p. 217.
- Encyclopedia of Modern History, editor James Clark, (Hamlyn, London 1978) p. 308.