Page 106 - Afrika Must Unite

THE ADMINISTRATIVE INSTRUMENT 91
senior grades of the service. This would ensure an ample nucleus
of African civil servants ready to take over the highest positions
of trust when we gained full independence.
This programme would, I knew, have the effect of reducing
the incentive of British officials to stay. I made no secret about my
ultimate intentions and aims, and they knew that their days
were num bered. In the subsequent bargaining I would have
had, if I had not already been sceptical of the claim, to revise
the self-asserted claim that British civil servants entered the
colonial service from a sense of altruistic concern for the better­
m ent of the ‘backward, primitive peoples’. John Stuart M ill’s
description of the colonial civil service as ‘a form of outdoor relief
for the sons of the British middle class’ is more apposite.
For their point of view I had full understanding. I knew they
had careers to consider and had joined the colonial service under
certain conditions of security. They would be unable in the new
regime of independence to retain the status they had enjoyed
under the old colonial regime. They had the choice of leaving
or of surrendering their existing terms of appointm ent and join­
ing the Gold Coast service under full local control. I therefore
offered inducement in the form of a compensation programme
for loss of career. There was a good deal of haggling and I was
rather saddened at the open explosion of the m yth of the British
colonial civil servant’s disinterestedness in financial rewards, his
missionary purpose of carrying ‘the white m an’s burden’. One
hundred and forty decided to leave immediately and another
eighty-three left shortly after. The Africanization programme
therefore had to be stepped up. O n the surface, some of the
British officials appeared to adjust themselves to the new con­
ditions and seemed to adapt their minds to working under, or
side by side with, their African colleagues.
After 1957, when Ghana achieved independence, the position
of our civil service became better than it had been in 1951. But it
was still far from satisfactory. For though the British had ceased
to rule, they had hedged us in with the detailed safeguards, set out
in the constitution, of the position, salary, pension rights and
tenure of office of the civil servant. Reading these, one might
be forgiven for imagining that this charter had been specially
framed to guarantee the security of the civil servant rather than to