Attitudes
Talking after his retirement of the lack of planning in the early days in East Africa, Mitchell said "there was no colonial policy, for Secretaries of State changed every eighteen months or so; so no one ever disciplined a Governor and no Secretary of State would ever force a row with settlers". However, Mitchell had a paternalistic attitude towards Africans, considering that they needed help from white settlers to become civilized. In The Agrarian Problem in Kenya he said of Africans: "They are a people who, however much natural ability and however admirable attributes they may possess, are without a history, culture or religion of their own and in that they are, as far as I know, unique in the modern world. Once progressive, by 1947 Mitchell had become highly conservative. In May that year he wrote to Arthur Creech Jones, Secretary of State for the Colonies, saying Britain's task was "to civilise a great mass of human beings who are at present in a very primitive moral, cultural and social state".
Read more about this topic: Philip Euen Mitchell
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