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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Britain's response to post-Second World War colonial crisis, 1947-50: findings and reflections from the Nigeria research
Author:Nwokweji, G. UgoISNI
Year:1994
Periodical:Frankfurter afrikanistische Blätter
Issue:6
Pages:75-86
Language:English
Geographic terms:Nigeria
Great Britain
Subjects:colonialism
national liberation movements
Abstract:In the aftermath of the Second World War the British colonial State in Nigeria came under severe pressure. The traditional elites who had been the mainstay of the colonial regime lost much of their power. There was growing pressure from the labour movement and the nationalist parties. Expatriates' initial impulse to suppress the nationalists through harsh policies only aggravated the situation. The present author considers the colonial State's response to the crises which these forces generated, using recently declassified materials available at the British Public Record Office, notably the PRO/CO 537 series of documentation entitled 'Colonial-General Supplementary Original Correspondence', which include sensitive security measures from late 1947 in the form of intelligence summaries coded 'POSSUM'. Imperial responses as seen in these files were part of Britain's strategy of weakening the modernizing elites through the simultaneous application of reforms and coercion. This involved formal and informal educational, social and political programmes and the Africanization of the civil and military bureaucracies, aimed at attracting as many of the modernizing elites as possible to collaboration, on the one hand, and the isolation of the radical 'extremist' or 'communist' elements, whose containment was viewed as a matter of first priority, on the other. Notes, ref.
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