Photographs Explain Empire to Me
by Drew Thompson
Issue 98 Summer 2019
View Contents ▸
The public relations role for the British Empire was carried out, after World War II, by the Central Office of Information. Their photographic collection is now housed at the National Archives. Drew Thompson has been looking through the images produced to represent life in Britain’s African colonies and asking how closely they match the reality of the last years of British rule in Africa.
Setting the stage
During World War I and II, the Ministry of Information
produced wartime propaganda for the British government.
In 1946, the Central Office of Information (COI)
replaced the Ministry of Information, marking a shift and
new front in the British government’s attempts to influence
public opinion. From its opening, the COI operated
a photographic section that amassed and circulated news
agency style photographs of Africa and Asia, sites of
British imperial rule. 
COI caption: The principle of the Salvation Army Institute for the Blind in Kenya, Brigadier Osborne helps a student to read Braille.
Then, in 1966 just as the UK recognised
the independence of its colonies in Africa and Asia,
the COI photographic section ceased its Africa and Asia
coverage. The COI used its expansive archive for public
relations and disinformation campaigns that targeted
audiences in Great Britain at a time when the British government
transformed itself into a social welfare state and
grappled with decolonisation. The reality portrayed by the
COI photographs greatly differed from the one that colonial
states and populations native to Africa experienced
while living under British colonial rule.
COI caption: Radiographers need to have a thorough knowledge of the bone structure of the human frame. This skeleton is used for lectures given to pupils in the X-ray department.
COI caption: White Fathers in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast. Priests of the Society of Missionaries of Africa – more popularly known as the White Fathers – are responsible for a great deal of welfare work among the people of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, where a number of flourish missions are established. Picture shows: the dispensary at Nandom gives an average of 37,000 consultations each year. Here a White Sister chats with a mother who is waiting her turn in the queue with her baby.
Photography went hand in hand with European colonisation in Africa. Before 1884, European occupation of Africa was marginal. The Berlin Conference of 1884 separated Africa into segments as part of an attempt to lessen competition and to bring territorial definition to European economic and political interests on the continent. Great Britain and France became the largest colonising powers in Africa. From the late eighteenth to mid-twentieth century in British colonies photography was practiced by missionaries and for scientific purposes. The colonial states that Great Britain constructed in parts of Western, Eastern and Southern Africa made their own photographs or integrated photographers into expeditions depending on the interests of individual administrators. The British public did not have the same views of Africa as British colonial officials and populations native to the colonies.
Photography was instrumental to how the British
and French publics, amongst many other European
spectators, became aware of colonial Africa. In order to
promote government policies, the British and French governments
organised and hosted public exhibitions, starting
with the Great Exhibition in 1851 and continuing up to
the inter-war period when events like the British Empire
Exhibition of 1924 and the Paris Colonial Exposition of
1931 took place.
COI caption: Mr. K.A. Quagraine (left) a Technical Officer, and Mr. M.J. Ayensu-Peters, Sub-Inspector, both of the Government Department of Post and Telecommunications recently left the Gold Coast for the United Kingdom on a government scholarship in connection with the Department’s training scheme for its officers. This picture shows the two officers trying to locate in the engineering room in Accra a fault in the automatic telephone system with the aid of a chart.
Ethnography played a central part in many of the exhibitions and was a channel for racism. The display of anthropometric images that sought to measure the differences between races was common to exhibitions hosted from the late nineteenth century. From the 1870s, exhibitions simulated ‘native village’ life through a combination of photographic reproductions, the display of living populations in mocked up habitations, and taxidermy. Exhibitions conveyed the racist ideologies and logics that had initially prompted Europeans to travel en masse to the continent of Africa with their cameras.
After World War II sustained public outcry over
the widespread and large scale killing of Jewish populations
in Europe was critical to condemning the racist
ideologies associated not only with Nazism but also
Europe’s imperial impulses.
COI caption: African recruits receive instruction in traffic control at the Kenyan Police Training School at Kigano, Central Province. The School was opened in 1948.
The incompetence of colonial
administrators and their frequent abuse of power further
undermined assertions of racial superiority that European
nation-states had used to justify colonial occupation.
Long before the end of World War II, labour and land
protests as well as the rise of African-born and European-educated
political philosophers had planted the seeds for Africa’s independence. After decades of ambivalence, the British public had little appetite for the nation’s longstanding
and failing imperial aspirations. Nevertheless, the
British government was not ready to abandon its colonies.
The African continent presented labour and material
resources that could prove beneficial to the post war
rebuilding of Great Britain’s economy. The British needed
a new image of empire that reflected and withstood the
post-World War II global landscape and geopolitical
realities. This is where the COI came into the picture of
British Empire.
COI caption: For or Against the Federation... Going to the Poll in Southern Rhodesia 14.6.53 A member of the coloured community casting his vote at the District Polling Station, Bulawayo – during the polling to decide the Federation of not problem. This man was the last coloured voter to cast his vote in Bulawayo.
Giving Empire a Make Over
Housed at the National Archives in London, the COI photographs
of Africa and Asia number over 8,000 images,
and collectively reflect an attempt by the COI to generate
a comprehensive view of British imperialism as decolonisation
was happening in real time. Populations in Great
Britain and its African colonies had contrasting views
on decolonisation. Just as in the UK, many photographic
practices flourished in African colonies; there were photographic
economies of studio portraiture and documentary
photography that African populations accessed widely in
parallel to British use of photography. However, the COI
was not concerned with Africans’ views of themselves.
Like a press office, the COI aimed to influence British
public opinion with regards to the benefits and outcomes
of colonial rule. Officials came up with a particular story,
paired photographs with long-form stories and captions
and sent the packaged materials to news agencies
and publications for reproduction as recipients deemed
appropriate.
COI caption: Salvation Army Captain L. Coleman technical instructor from Melbourne, Australia, showing a blind student how to make a basket.
Categorised and grouped according to region
and subject matter, the photographs depicted scenes
of voting, technical and health training, buildings, landscapes,
and sporting events that served the dual purpose
of illustrating how Great Britain contributed to Africa’s
development and how citizens from across the Commonwealth
could represent the interests of Great Britain
abroad. For example, a photograph shows a Salvation
Army captain from Australia who had travelled to Kenya
where he taught blind students basket weaving. The
historical dates associated with the photographs correspond
with widespread and robust efforts from African
populations in the photographed locations to envision and
achieve independence. However, these currents are not
explicitly found in the COI photographs.
COI caption: Under the guidance of their instructor, Miss Rahab Wangui, Kikuyu girls have a needlework lesson at a Nyeri youth club. The girls are wearing uniforms they made themselves.
The COI images do illustrate African populations
exercising political opinions through the placement of
ballots in boxes or expressing their views and support for
political organisations by looking at posters. Even then,
as Great Britain recognised the independence of African
nations like Ghana (1957), Nigeria (1960), and Kenya
(1963), there appears uncertainty in how to tell the story
of the historical moment and how to frame Great Britain’s
role in that history. The narrative constructed hedges on
forgetting of the past and displays at times an unwillingness to recognise that British involvement in Africa is ending.
COI caption: Rhodesian Force for the Far East Southern Rhodesia volunteers for the Far East are now undergoing intensive training at the King George VI Barracks in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. This picture shows: members of the force undergoing Bren gun training.
The COI photographs reaffirmed the political,
economic, and military practice of indirect rule, in use
since the 19th century. British officials in London drafted
laws and left their enforcement to populations that settled
from Great Britain in its territories. Unlike the colonising
powers of France and Portugal, Great Britain
never pretended to confer citizenship onto populations
native to its colonies in Africa. To be ‘British’ was to be
‘white’, and ‘African’, ‘black’. The COI photographs do
not demonstrate a change of heart with regards to this
policy. In fact, the collection promotes this long view of
racial difference through the guise of instruction. British
populations appeared in Africa as teachers, caregivers,
election observers, and surrogates, who touched, held,
and watched benevolently over African populations. They
showed them, through architectural models and demonstrations,
how to operate the infrastructure and political
and economic systems introduced by Great Britain.
Exchanges between the ‘African’ pupil and ‘British’
teacher at a school operated by the religious group Salvation
Army allowed the COI to depict African populations
as dependent and needing paternalistic guidance.
COI caption: Mobile post office savings bank for Kenya: Photograph shows (left to right) The Postmaster General, Mr R.E. German, Mr John Burton (inside van) who will have charge of the mobile post office, and an African eager to open an account.
However, the British government and its colonial representatives, the majority of which included civilian settlers, were not benign in the ways the photographs depicted them. In Kenya and the Asian colony of Malaya, British land and labour policies, and British settlers’ reliance on force to assert power, caused anti-colonial unrest. In Kenya, ethnic groups like the Kikuyu, Meru, and Embu responded by joining forces to form the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA) and to challenge British colonial authority through sporadic attacks. Tensions resulted in the colonial state declaring a state of emergency. In response, British officials used counter-insurgency tactics, including detaining political activists in concentration camps and subjecting detainees to invasive surveillance and identification measures, in order to separate the KLFA according to ethnic group.
The COI archive conceals these forms of violence and its repercussions – documented elsewhere photographically and through oral histories – perpetrated by British colonial settlers in Kenya. Depending on what side you were looking, these events became known as either the Mau Mau Rebellion, the Mau Mau Revolt, or the Kenyan State of Emergency. In the wake of this unrest, the COI presented a reality where Kikuyu women perform needlework, a mobile post office savings bank came to visit, and police officers learn different traffic patterns and how to fire rifles. There are suggestions of the wider political contexts however, especially in terms of the COI’s coverage of Southern Rhodesia where photographs show the training of military forces. In the short-term, the training of these white men to use automatic weaponry provided additional manpower for the British government to fight in the Malayan State of Emergency. In the longterm, such activity contributed to the regional divisions that resulted in arguments for Southern Rhodesia’s independence from Britain under white-minority rule.
Looking back (or forward)
The archived COI prints present the work of professional photographers who were employed in the service of the COI and mobilised the documentary qualities of the camera to tell the story that the COI wanted to tell. The COI did not fashion stories by looking at the independently produced images of photojournalists. Instead, it produced stories through photographs and text that followed its own briefs and which news agencies and publishers elected to reproduce and circulate. These could be tailored articles, as in the case of the collection of photographs titled ‘Rhodesian Force for the Far East’ or, in some cases, like the file on Southern Rhodesia that was re-captioned and re-catalogued as depicting ‘racial types’, used opportunistically – standard practices of news agency methodology in the mid-twentieth century.
The COI photographs are part of a longer and still ongoing history of disinformation, misrepresentation, and the imperial imagination. The COI photographs served to instruct British publics how to look at empire post-World War II. But, in hindsight, they elicit a range of responses, some of which are contradictory and representative of the semi-truths and part-falsehoods that the collection promoted. Independence struggles in Africa, social movements, and the global institutions that followed after World War II challenged the territorial and political condition of empire. Despite these changes, little about the ‘look’ and appearance of empire changed. The makers of the COI archive already knew the story they wanted to tell. Photographs were another way to perpetuate that lie.
Other articles on photography from the 'Historical' category ▸