Accredited to Africa: British diplomatic representation and African experience, c. 1960-95

How justified is the complaint sometimes voiced by British businessmen and other UK visitors to contemporary Africa that, compared to 'the [good old] colonial days', Britain's FCO representatives have no experience of Africa and little idea about who's who and what's going on in their bailiwick? The aim of this article is to construct a professional profile of Britain's Heads of Mission assigned to newly independent African states over the past 35 years, with a view to assessing the extent of their African experience. This period also neatly coincides with what in one sense can be interpreted as a single FO generation, in that the mean entry age into the Diplomatic Service is around 25 and the maximum retiring age is a strict 60. The statistical biodata on which the argument is premised are presented in the 19 Mission Tables appended. The article concludes with an examination of the major issues surrounding the question of 'African experience' among those Heads of Mission.     

In search of an anatomy of African administrators

By way of welcoming one of the first—and still too few—accounts by African administrators of what it was like to have served under two masters, one British and one African, the article first reviews the chronology of the literature on and by Africa's administrators. Starting from a survey of the history of the British Colonial Administrative Service and some of the recent memoirs of its members, a milestone in the literature is signalled by the shift in emphasis of public service commissions of enquiry away from primary concern with salaries and conditions of service to concerns with the positive Africanization of the civil services. The gradual responsibility of Africans themselves for such reports is then noted, often culminating in a recommendation for the establishment of an Institute of Public Administration. While the quantity and quality of insiders' literature by Africa's civil servants still falls short of that which has characterized the writing by Indian members of the former Indian Civil Service, the position has improved since the publication of the proceedings of the Inter-African Public Administration seminars and by the noticeably less constrained comments by the bureaucracy during a period of military rule. The article concludes with a look at the Ife University project and calls for an extension of such primary research into African administration while the first, and historically unique, generation of African bureaucrats are still alive to record their memories and interpret their significance against subsequent analysis.