Threats to empire: illicit distillation, venereal diseases, and colonial disorder in British West Africa, 1930–1948

Abstract

Between 1930 and 1948 colonial governments in British West Africa found themselves fighting an unusual battle against ordinary Africans on two fronts: illicit distillation from 1930, which undermined colonial revenue, assailed colonial hegemony in the flagrant disrespect for law, and compromised British subscription to international conventions that forbade liquor distillation in the African colonies; and prostitution, particularly during World War II, when venereal diseases emerged as a real threat to military preparedness among British military forces. Though I have written on liquor traffic, illicit distillation, and prostitution in colonial West Africa, I underestimated the American influence on the international context that framed these issues between the 1880s and the 1920s and the energy of American moral reform organizations that drove temperance and the social purity movement. The American factor enters African historiography from decolonization, and America and the former Soviet Union typically are presented as anti-colonial forces. Elided within this historiographical tradition are America's imperial history and the formative influence of American moral reformers in shaping the very nature of colonial rule in the British Empire. The internationalized struggle against vice in the British Empire lent a depth to colonial responses and a sharpness to the colonial crackdown on illicit distillers and prostitutes in West Africa in the 1930s and 1940s that radicalized ordinary men and women and unveiled their potential for nationalism and mass politics. In the Gold Coast, for example, these ordinary men and women would be heavily represented in Kwame Nkrumah's Convention People's Party (CPP). The collapse of prohibition in America in 1933 in the face of widespread criminality and corruption took the wind out of the sails of the international moral reform movement and helped undermine the discourse of the “civilizing mission” and the “white man's burden” as rationales for colonialism. In the aftermath of economic depression in the 1930s and World War II, colonial emphasis shifted to development in partnership with African nationalists. Nkrumah in the early years of Ghana's independence commented on how the mosquito was an unsung hero, for its presence in West Africa limited white settlement and removed a bottleneck from the process of decolonization in West Africa.