Unintended consequences........................

On October 6, 1939, Malcolm MacDonald, Britain's Secretary of State for the Colonies, called a special meeting on "Future Policy in Africa."  The meeting included a veteran colonial official named Lord Hailey and many other notable British Africanists.
     Why would Africa be high on the list of priorities only a month after Britain declared war on Germany?  Many of the official class feared that Britain's survival, not to mention the survival of the empire, depended on the allegiance of non-European peoples.  The British were going to need troops and raw materials from the empire to fight the war.  And it was hard to keep the allegiance of colonial subjects when the empire was built around a racial hierarchy that reflected still-prevalent feelings of racial superiority by the British, feelings not lost on the victims of such racism.   As one colonial official put it, "Colonial subjects might be tempted to say that they do not have much freedom to defend."  Other officials and observers feared a worldwide revolt by nonwhites against white rule, perhaps lead by the rising power, Japan, and destroying the empire.  The British realized during the new war that racism was becoming a serious political liability.  The failure to endorse Japan's racial equality proposal at the Versailles peace talks after the previous war was not a huge embarrassment.
     Lord Hailey would attempt to remove this liability during World War II by reinventing yet again the idea of technocratic development as a justification for colonial rule.  The empire's legitimacy was going to be based on its technical ability to achieve rapid development, not on the racial superiority of the British.  The empire could present itself as a benevolent autocrat for the colonial people.  The British even banned racist statements by colonial officials to conform to the new narrative, although the victims of racism knew that such a ban did not immediately change racist attitudes.
      Ironically, Lord Hailey's justification for colonialism and his cover-up of racism would later appeal to the anticolonial victims of racism, the new African political leaders who would emerge after the sooner-than-expected collapse of the British African empire in the 1950s and early 1960s.  The new African leaders found state-led technocratic development to be a justification for their own aspirations to unchecked power.  The new African leaders would inherit the role of benevolent autocrat from the defunct empire.

-William Easterly,  The Tyranny of Experts:  Economists, Dictators, and The Forgotten Rights Of The Poor