LORD HAILEY AND THE MAKING OF THE AFRICAN SURVEY

Abstract

IN HIS FOREWORD to Lord Hailey's monumental African Survey (1938) Lord Lothian asserted (a) that the project had been directly inspired by General Smuts' Rhodes Memorial Lectures at Oxford in 1929 and (b) that the publication had been delayed by the expansion of the scope and 'by the illness of the Director for some months during the winter of 1937 and the early part of the presexlt year'.l In this article I argue that the Smuts genealogy, on which John Hargreaves and Kenneth Robinson have already cast doubt, ought to be discarded almost entirely.2 Further, although the statements concerning the enlargement of scope and the Director's illness are true, they severely understate the mental and physical crisis the Survey caused for Lord Hailey himself. Indeed it came close to killing him. The African Survey was the fruit of long germination not of a mere off-the-cuff remark; it was, in effect! the culmination of the interwar generation's debate on African problems. Apart from mavericks like Norman Leys, whose 'extremist' views on race now seem so sensible, British attitudes towards Africa were shaped by the interaction between two broad schools. The first, dominating southern as well as much of central and eastern Africa, stressed economic development through white initiative, capital and management of migrant black labour, the evolution of Africans 'on their own lines', and segregation. The second, centering in West Africa and Uganda, emphasized peasant production, protection of African interests, and lndirect rule. Although the relationship between the two schools became increasingly dialectical, they drew on a common bank of scientific and anthropological theory, employed common language, and shared the elementary assumption, based either on race or culture, that Africans were