Page 18 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

The Abandonment of Aden 5

institution, however crude they might be in concept and operation, to have
emerged in South Arabia. As an ultimate sanction for obtaining compliance
with British wishes, the governor of Aden had the power to depose a recalci­

trant or ineffectual ruler and to replace him with a more competent or pliable
member of the ruling family, one who, as often as not, would be subservient to

the more powerful daulah. The sum effect of this policy of intervention,
especially when reinforced in the 1950s and 1960s by an increasing though
hardly munificent provision of economic aid, educational and medical services,
and improvements in agriculture and communications, was to undermine the

standing and influence of the hereditary rulers, and the traditional structure of
authority throughout the protectorates. Unwittingly or not, it paved the way

for the debacle of 1967.
The stirrings of political discontent were not much in evidence in Aden
colony before the end of the Second World War. In the next few years the

colony began to feel the ripples from the dismantling and partition of the
Indian empire, from the communist insurgency in Malaya, and from the
beginnings of the general movement within the British tropical dependencies

towards national independence and an end to imperial rule. A legislative
council composed of nominated members was introduced in Aden in 1947 to
give the Adenis a share, however circumscribed, in their own government. The

innovation whetted their appetite for further participation in politics, and in
1955 the first elections were held in the colony to fill four new elective seats on
the council. Up until this time political activity had been almost exclusively

confined to the upper layer of Adeni society, the wealthy merchant families
who controlled most of Aden’s commerce. They were for the greater part Arab,
though there were a few prominent Indian families among them. The popu­

lation of Aden in 1955 was 138,234, of which Adeni Arabs numbered 36,910.
There were, however, 18,881 Arabs from the protectorates living in the
colony, and 48,088 Yemenis, so that the total number of Arab inhabitants was

103,879, or over 75 per cent of the population. The next largest group was the
Indians (15,817), and after them the Somalis (10,611) and the Europeans
(4,488), most of whom were British. Before 1948 there had been a Jewish

community of more than 7,000 in Aden; but after the anti-Jewish riots which
occurred in that year as a consequence of the war in Palestine all save some 800
had left the colony.

Political activity, as just mentioned, was for all practical purposes restricted
to die hierarchy of wealthy and educated Adeni Arabs. They conducted their
activities through the Aden Association, a body they founded in 1950 to

campaign for a greater measure of self-government for the colony and for
its eventual independence within the British Commonwealth. The Aden
Association was, by any standards, and especially by those prevailing

in most of the Middle East at the time, an organization of impeccable
respectability.