For Loyd, "The guiding principle should be that retaining empire in the long run is no longer an option," Cooper explained. "The questions are: how is one going to devolve it , at what pace, to whom, and how are British interest going to be protected in doing so?" Even then, Loyd's assumptions would be thoroughly debunked in the years after the memo was written. "What you see in the actual text is that he was pretty clueless about timing, and had illusions of Britain being much more in control than they in fact were."

* * *

Some of Loyd's predictions were right: Nigeria did fracture along regional lines, and South Africa's apartheid government certainly became more violent and more isolated as the next decade progressed. Others were wrong: There was to be no trans-national French "federation" in East Africa, headquartered in Dakar and Brazzaville.

Accurate or not, the memo is certainly the work of a man who would be considered a racist by modern-day standards. "The West will in many cases be surrendering power to peoples who are not far removed from primitive savagery," Loyd writes; only a page in, he ruminates on West Africa's enthusiasm for western-style education, and somehow declares that this is "due partly to the ... greater virility and adaptability of the Negro and Berber elements as opposed to the Bantu." This in an official document, written by a cabinet minister.

Yet at other points, Loyd concedes that African populations have produced educated elites and charismatic local leaders that Britain will have no choice but to work with. "Are we dealing with sophisticated politicians or are we dealing with primitive people? Both tendencies are in the document," says Cooper. Loyd was thinking realistically about where things were headed in Africa -- but this wasn't enough to counteract a basically-racist view of Africa and its people.

This is hardly the only tension in the memo, and it's far from the only one having to do with the connections between British national interests and racism. In 1959, Britain faced a major dilemma in southern and central Africa, where European settlers were on the cusp of becoming a serious headache for the former colonial power. South Africa was an independent state under minority rule, and in Rhodesia, a restive and decreasingly-controllable European minority seemed poised to dominate the British colony's political and economic life to a degree that could embarrass or discredit its ostensible masters.

At the same time, Loyd believed that the British government couldn't just cut and run:

We have a particular responsibility to do everything we reasonably can in order to ensure that peoples of all races who have made their homes in such territories with the encouragement of successive British Governments will be able to live there in security and to contribute to the development and prosperity of their own part of Africa.

Cooper says that British policymakers were "afraid that the settlers in Rhodesia might abandon the British empire in favor of South Africa, and you'd have a greater South Africa instead of a greater Britain." One solution was a "federation" that would merge present-day Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi into a single political unit. "If it holds together," Loyd wrote, it could be "sizable and viable," a well as a way for Britain to maintain control over both white Rhodesians and its imperial holdings.

And federation would have another benefit as well. In the memo, Loyd warns of the dangers of the "balkanization of Africa," and the emergence of a continent of small sates which were, in Cooper's words, vulnerable to "political machinations by relatively small elites." Loyd dreaded the idea of an archipelago of small, non-viable, and politically weak countries destined to generations of authoritarian rule and external meddling (from one perspective, this is exactly what has happened in the decades since the memo was written). In 1959, big, diverse states were a way out of this problem. Loyd believed their creation was within Britain's capabilities.

