in the dark and then on went some 40 odd spotlights, floodlights
and footlights, and the drums and the l1and beat tattoo and the
audience settled down to enjoy themsel'-'s ... Then some schoolboys
did the Parade of the Toy Soldiers. I got the particulars of
this from the Duke of York's School at Dover, and adapted it to
local conditions. The boys wore white trousers, red tunics, and
white pill box hats, the officer a bear-skin ... The tattoo then
proceeded. Fireworks. A war dance by 120 warriors in Leopard
Skins. Ostrich feathers and spears and shields. Then 'From Savage
to Soldier' showing the process of turning native warriors into real
soldiers.
The central event, and the sensation of the evening, was a relay
of the voice of the new king/emperor, broadcast to the gathering
through concealed loudspeakers. And next day there was a ceremony
at the high court, which involved the Kabaka, the judges, the
governor, the chiefs and the bishops-' also my invention and it
turned out to be a most dignified ceremony'. 55
The rest of Twining's adequately distinguished career displayed the
same concern for invented ceremonial. He was a flamboyant governor
of Tanganyika. At the end he became one of the first creation of life
peers - that supreme example of invented tradition- selling off his
Grand Cross Mantle of the Order of St Michael and St John in order
to buy 'a second-hand robe trimmed with real ermine'. 56
Everywhere in British colonial Africa such rituals were taken very
seriously, if only rarely with Twining's exuberance. In a recent
discussion of' State and Peasantry in Colonial Africa', John Lonsdale
remarks that 'the question of the statishness of the colonial state in
Africa' can perhaps best be penetrated 'by looking at its festivals'.
All over the Empire [he writes] there were celebrations on 6 May
1935, the silver jubilee of King George V, even in little Kakamega,
a district headquarters in the hills of western Kenya ... The power
of the state was on view with a parade of police ... The majesty of
rule was invoked with a speech from the governor, read by the
district commissioner, who observed that King George was present,
even to the meanest of his subjects, in his image on their coins,
on the medals of their chiefs. He was 'a very great ruler and dearly
loves his people and sees that they are ruled justly. He has always
shown a very deep personal concern in your welfare' - and the
schoolmaster-leaders of peasant opinion were even then acting on
the principles of peasant legitimism by by-passing the king's
serv.ants and petitioning his House of Commons for redress of
grievances ... The royal family was still further linked to the
material improvement in peasant citizenship. In Queen Victoria's
day 'very few people had any clothes except skins and blankets
and hardly any knew how to read. Now you have railways and
roads, schools and hospitals, towns and trading centres, which give
you the opportunity for development which civilization and good
government bring in their train'. Colonial improvement was linked
to peasant recreation. The day's proceedings included a display by
the local boy scout troop ... The rulers sought their subjects'
affection in carnival, almost indeed in saturnalia. There were games
for Africans only, the slippery pole, a tug-of-war, blindfold
football biffing; but there was inter-racial sport too, a bicycle race,
a donkey derby, even a fancy dress soccer match between
Europeans and Indians for the natives to gawp at. Peasant
economy was eo-opted too; there was an egg, cent and flour
race ... Peasant culture was used too; the day started off with church
services. Europeans attended the high culture of an Anglican
service; to Africans was left the 'low culture' of a Catholic
celebration. 57
It is plain that British administrators took all this sort of thing very
seriously- Twining as governor of Tanganyika refused to negotiate
with Nyerere's Tanganyika African Union because he regarded them
as disloyal to the queen. But it is very difficult to assess how seriously
Africans took it. Lonsdale describes the Kakamega Silver Jubilee
celebrations as part of the 'indigenization of the state', and shows
how the leaders of the local African peasantry operated easily within
its assumptions; in Northern Rhodesia the chiefs played up to the
official 'theology' by addressing their requests for guns or uniforms
to the king through his governor and sent the king presents of
leopard skins or tusks; African dance associations elected their kings
and Kaisers to preside over them with proper ceremony; millenarian
preachers told their audiences that King George, who had hitherto
been deceived by his corrupt advisers, would assume direct control
and usher in the golden age. 58 Cl earl/ ~e symbol of monarchy
appealed to the imagination. Perhaps for I' while it also contributed
to some sort of ideological consensus between Europeans and their
African collaborators. As we shall see, a good deal of the politics of
collaboration took place within the limits set by the colonial theory
of monarchy. But as Twining's fatal rigidity in Tanganyika demonstrates,
the colonial manipulation of monarchy and indeed the whole
process of traditional inventiveness, having served a good deal of
practical purpose, eventually came to be counter-productive.
Twining's apparent cheerful irreverence and readiness to manufacture
tradition only thinly masked his own profound commitment to
monarchy, aristocracy, to neo-tradition. It was easier to invent a
tradition than to modify it and make it flexible once invented.
Invented tradition, as distinct from unconsciously evolving custom,
could only be taken seriously if it were followed to the letter. That
famous 'spirit' which was so celebrated at Budo could not blow
where it listed among the dry bones of colonial ceremonialism.
AFRICAN ATTEMPTS TO MAKE USE OF EUROPEAN
NEO-TRADITION
One of the functions of the invention of tradition in nineteenth-century
Europe was to give rapid and recognizable symbolic form to
developing types of authority and submission. In Africa, and under
the oversimplifying influence of colonial rule, the symbolic statements
themselves became simpler and more emphatic. African observers of
the new colonial society could hardly miss the significance that
Europeans attached to the public rituals of monarchy, the gradations
of military rank, the rituals of bureaucracy. Africans who sought to
manipulate these symbols for themselves, without accepting the
implications of subordination within a neo-tradition of governance,
were usually accused by Europeans of triviality, of confusing form
with reality and of imagining that it was possible to achieve power
or prosperity just by emulating ritual practice. But if this were true,
the over-emphasis on the forms had already been created by colonial
whites themselves, most of whom were the beneficiaries rather than
the creators of wealth and power. If their monopoly of the rites and
symbols of neo-tradition was so important to the whites, it was by
no means foolish of Africans to seek to appropriate them.
It seems to me that there were broadly four ways in which Africans
sought to draw on European invented traditions, in a relatively
autonomous way and without accepting the roles which Europeans
assigned to Africans within them. At one level, the aspirant African
bourgeoisie sought to make its own that range of attitudes and
activities which defined the European middle classes. At another
level, many African rulers - and their supporters - struggled to
achieve the right to express their authority through the use ofthe titles
and symbols of European neo-traditional monarchy. Again, there
were Africans who adapted European neo-traditional symbolism in
a spirit of fashion, proclaiming their own sophistication not so much
by 'aping' Europeans as by an impressive display of their ability to
keep up to date, to discern the realities of colonial power and to
comment shrewdly upon them. But in many ways the most interesting
use of European neo-traditions was by Africans who found themselves
uprooted and who needed to discover new ways of making a new
society.
The most vivid account of African petty bourgeois aspirations and
their appropriation of British middle class neo-traditions is given by
Brian Willan in his work on the mission-educated Africans of
Kimberley in the 1890s. 'Kimberley in the 1890s', he writes, 'was a
supremely British place: daily life in the Diamond City, indeed,
perhaps expressed as clearly as anywhere in the Empire the meaning ·
and reality of British imperial hegemony.' There existed in the city:
a growing and increasingly coherent class of educated Africans
who had been drawn to Kimberley because of the opportunities that
it provided for employment and for tb-e utilization of the skills
associated with the literacy which theyiJm~sessed.
These men aspired to become secure denizens of the nineteenthcentury
British liberal universe- a universe of freedom and equality
under the common Jaw, of secure property rights and of entrepreneurial
vigour. At the same time they sought to symbolize their
citizenship of this universe through their mastery of the more
'irrational' invented traditions of the late nineteenth-century British
middle class.
They outdid colonial whites in their loyalty to the crown. 'One
peculiarly important and pervasive symbol. .. which gave expression
to the values and beliefs that they held, was the figure of Queen
Victoria'; they celebrated the queen's Diamond Jubilee in 1897 with
banquets and loyal addresses in which they dramatized their own
'progressive' achievements and their trust in the monarchy as a
guarantor of them. They set up 'a network of regular activities and
involvement in churches, clubs and societies'. Above all, they took
to sport:
Sport [writes Willan] was important in the life of Kimberley's
African petty bourgeoisie, providing a further bond of association
and the means of