Sir Andrew Benjamin Cohen

Andrew Cohen's career did not begin in the corridors of the Colonial Office, but in the more austere ones of the Inland Revenue, the British tax administration. This initial passage — fleeting but significant — attests that this son of London's Jewish bourgeoisie did not immediately obtain the position to which his intellectual capacities might have entitled him from the outset. Trained at Malvern College, one of the great English public schools, and then at Trinity College, Cambridge — crucible of the British intellectual elite, which counted among its members figures as disparate as Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore and numerous high-ranking officials of the Empire —, Cohen carried a classical education of indisputable quality. His rapid transfer from the Inland Revenue to the Colonial Office marked the beginning of a vocation to which his intellectual training and, perhaps, his particular sensitivity to the fate of minorities and dominated peoples, predisposed him.

It was at the Colonial Office that Cohen found the institutional framework for his action. He rose through the ranks with a rapidity that testifies to his exceptional analytical capacities: by 1947, he held the position of Assistant Under-Secretary of State for African Affairs, a strategic position that conferred on him decisive influence over the policy of the entire African continent. Before reaching that point, the Second World War had mobilized him in a little-known but demanding mission: the organization of the supply of Malta, an island besieged and bombed by the Axis powers, whose survival depended on Britain's logistical capacity to maintain supply lines under enemy fire. This mission reveals an aspect of Cohen often eclipsed by his African achievements: that of an administrator capable of operational efficiency in conditions of extreme urgency, and not merely an architect of long-term policies.

His Jewishness, in this context, is not an abstract datum. Testimonies from his contemporaries indicate that he was profoundly affected by the Shoah, and that this experience nourished his visceral anti-racism. A servant of the Empire at the very moment when Europe was murdering its Jews, Cohen developed an acute awareness of racial hierarchies and their deadly consequences. This did not lead him to break with the service of the Empire — he remained until his death a loyal servant of the Crown —, but it profoundly inflected the way he conceived of this service: not as legitimate domination, but as a provisional and transitional responsibility, to be ultimately abolished by the emancipation of administered peoples.

The Jewish community of England, readmitted under Cromwell in the mid-17th century after the medieval expulsion of 1290, experienced a remarkable civic rise in the 18th and 19th centuries. Families such as the Cohen, Montefiore, Mocatta and Goldsmid progressively integrated into the mercantile and later administrative bourgeoisie of London, benefiting from an English society whose tolerance, relative and unequal though it was, enabled a progressive emancipation well before this was achieved in other parts of Europe. The Emancipation Act of 1858, which finally opened Parliament to Jews, was merely the legal consecration of a social and cultural process already largely underway.

The genealogy of Sir Andrew Cohen is documented and traces back to a leading figure in the English Jewish community: Levy Barent Cohen (c. 1740–1808), a merchant and London notable of Dutch origin, whose network of family alliances was considerable. From this Levy Barent Cohen also descends, through other branches, the Montefiore family — this network of related families forming what historians of Anglo-Jewry sometimes call a veritable Victorian Jewish "aristocracy." Sir Moses Montefiore, philanthropist and defender of persecuted Jews throughout the world, was thus related by marriage to this same Cohen stock, illustrating how service — to the community, to the nation — circulated through these interlocking lineages as a transmitted value.

The branch from which Sir Andrew descended belongs to this acculturated London Jewish bourgeoisie, for whom 19th-century civic emancipation opened the doors to universities, major state services and intellectual life. This trajectory — from tolerated margin to integration at the heart of the state apparatus — illustrates a form of involvement in collective life which, while not religious in the strict sense, extends in the British secular framework an ancient disposition of Judaism: a sense of the common good and public responsibility. Andrew Cohen and his sister Ruth Louisa were its most accomplished and visible expression. Ruth Louisa Cohen (1906–1991) was the first woman to head a Cambridge college — Newnham College, which she chaired from 1954 to 1972 — a specialist in agricultural economics whose work became authoritative. In a context where women remained largely excluded from senior academic posts, her accession to the head of a Cambridge college constituted a symbolic and institutional rupture of considerable significance. Brother and sister thus expressed, each in their own domain, the same inherited disposition: to break institutional ceilings, not through provocation, but through patient and obstinate demonstration of competence.

Before becoming governor of Uganda, Andrew Cohen was, at the Colonial Office, the intellectual architect of a new African policy. In May 1947, as Deputy Under-Secretary of State for African Affairs, alongside Arthur Creech Jones — Secretary of State for the Colonies and a figure of the Fabian left — he drafted and presented what historians have retained under the name of the "Cohen Report". This document constitutes the intellectual centerpiece of an entire career devoted to preparing African populations for self-determination.

The report defined four successive stages of constitutional advance: a gradual vision of the incorporation of Africans into local government institutions, then of internal self-government, before any prospect of formal independence. According to the analyses of historians who have studied this document, only the Gold Coast was deemed, at the time, capable of achieving autonomy in one generation; for most other territories, the horizon was far more distant, and full and complete independence was not even formally envisioned as an immediate objective. The report thus testified, in the same movement, to real reforming boldness and to the intrinsic limitations of a thought that remained profoundly paternalistic in its conception of the pace of African emancipation.

Cohen and Creech Jones shared a central conviction, inherited from the Fabian Society's colonial bureau founded in 1940: the system of indirect rule — colonial government through traditional chiefs, a legacy of Lord Lugard — was a relic of a "reactionary imperialism" that had to be overcome. In its place, the report advocated for direct and growing African participation in local affairs, through the strengthening of local governments and the formation of an educated elite capable of gradually taking hold of the reins of power. This project of training African elites at major British universities was moreover to find concrete illustration in Cohen's subsequent action in Uganda, where he facilitated the access of students such as Abu Mayanja — one of the first secretaries general of the Ugandan national congress — to Cambridge.

The doctrine of the four stages did not entirely withstand the acceleration of history: decolonization in fact proceeded far more rapidly and more chaotically than Cohen had foreseen. The Gold Coast became Nkrumah's independent Ghana as early as 1957; other territories achieved sovereignty in the following years, often before the conditions that the report judged necessary had been met. But the importance of the document is not measured by the accuracy of its forecasts: it is measured by the fact that it constituted, for an entire decade, the intellectual frame of reference from which British colonial policy in Africa was thought and debated. Historian Robinson qualified it as the "proconsul of African nationalism" — a somewhat misleading formulation, but one that accounts for the perception contemporaries had of a senior civil servant who, more than almost any other of his time, put the colonial bureaucracy at the service of a transition toward the post-imperial world.

Fortified by the doctrine he himself had helped forge, Andrew Cohen was appointed Governor of Uganda in 1952 — a post he held until 1957. His tenure there was, according to Makerere University, one of the most reformist of the entire precolonial period: he was preceded by a reputation as a convinced liberal, built on his years at the Colonial Office, and he arrived in Kampala with an ambitious program of constitutional reforms. He increased Ugandan representation on the Legislative Council (Legco), worked to strengthen local governments, and sought to lay the foundations for a modern agricultural economy by developing the cooperative movement, notably in the cotton sector, in order to enable Ugandan peasants to participate directly in export trade rather than remain confined to production under the control of Asian or European intermediaries.

His tenure was not, however, free of serious tensions, which illuminate the insurmountable contradictions of his position. In 1953, a major political crisis erupted when the Lukiiko, parliament of Buganda, demanded the independence of its kingdom from the rest of the protectorate. The Kabaka Mutesa II — called "Kabaka Freddie" — demanded that Buganda be placed under the Foreign Office rather than the Colonial Office, thereby signifying his wish to be treated not as a colonial subject but as a sovereign interlocutor. On 30 November 1953, Cohen deposed the Kabaka and ordered his exile to London. This decision, taken to maintain the unity of the protectorate against separatist tendencies, immediately backfired on him: Mutesa II became a martyr in the eyes of the Baganda, and the rejection of Cohenian policy was nearly universal among the Buganda population.

After two years of stubborn resistance, Cohen was forced to reinstate the Kabaka. The return of Mutesa II to Kampala on 17 October 1955 was accompanied by the signing of the 1955 Buganda Agreement — concluded on 18 October between Cohen and the Kabaka — which, while preserving the appearance of a British victory, in fact represented a resounding success for the Baganda: the monarch obtained for the first time since 1889 the power to appoint and dismiss his own chiefs, and he found himself, behind the fiction of a constitutional monarchy, in a position to effectively influence the governance of the country. In 1962, Mutesa II would become the first president of independent Uganda.

This crisis illustrates with striking clarity the condition of the reformist administrator within a system he does not entirely control. Cohen, deeply anti-racist and, according to his contemporaries, traumatized by the Shoah, had moreover compromised himself a few years earlier on the question of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland: convinced that the radical Afrikaner nationalism of South Africa constituted a more serious danger than the white paternalism of Southern Rhodesia, he had accepted an arrangement that sacrificed some of his anti-colonial ideals to raison d'État as he conceived it. These shadows are an integral part of his record: the reformer encountered the limits of a system he served while seeking to transform it.

Upon his return from Uganda, after representing the United Kingdom on the United Nations Trusteeship Council from 1957 to 1961, Cohen did not merely continue his administrative career: he set down his vision in a book. British Policy in Changing Africa, published in 1959, is the sole work he signed with his own name, and it is a document of the first order for anyone seeking to understand both the man and the era. It is neither a memoir in the ordinary sense nor a political pamphlet; it is an intellectually honest attempt, for its time, to ground in theory the policy he had helped to forge in practice since 1947.

The work expounds the Cohenic philosophy of colonial government: the rejection of indirect rule as a system founded on the artificial preservation of traditional structures incompatible with modernization; the conviction that only the direct participation of Africans in governmental institutions could prepare an orderly transition; and the idea, central to his thought, that the formation of educated elites capable of assuming the responsibilities of power was the sine qua non condition of any viable independence. Cohen also articulated in it his vision of cooperation between sovereign nations after independence — anticipating, in a sense, the preoccupations that were to become his own at the ministry of overseas development.

This book brought him an intellectual recognition that his administrative career, discreet by nature, had not always assured him. It was read and discussed in British academic and political circles reflecting on the future of Africa, and it remains today a historiographical source of primary importance for scholars studying post-war British colonial thought. In the overall economy of Cohen's life, this book occupies a particular place: it is the sole moment when the civil servant became an author, when the architect stepped out of the archives to publicly sign a vision of the world. In this regard, it extends a Jewish tradition that honors the written word as an act of transmission, the shaping of thought as an intellectual responsibility toward the community of readers.

After his mission at the UN, Andrew Cohen was entrusted from 1961 onwards with a new responsibility, linked to the creation of a ministry specially dedicated to development aid. When Harold Wilson's Labour government formally established the Overseas Development Ministry in 1964, Cohen became its first permanent secretary — the highest civil servant, the one who ensures the continuity of the institution beyond political changes. This appointment crowned an entire career turned towards the transition from an imperial order to a world of sovereign nations linked by solidarity and mutual aid.

This chapter of his life expresses with force a cardinal value of Judaism: tsedaka, not mere charity but distributive justice, the obligation to support the most vulnerable so that they may regain their autonomy. By devoting the final years of his career to structuring development aid, Cohen translated into the institutions of the modern state this ethic of responsibility towards the vulnerable. The highest form of tsedaka, according to the hierarchy established by Maimonides in the Mishné Torah, consists precisely in making the other capable of meeting their own needs — an ideal that joins the philosophy of development that Cohen strove to embody. The 1947 Report had set the theoretical framework for gradual emancipation ; the 1959 book had provided its doctrinal justification; the development ministry of 1964 constituted, in a sense, its institutional embodiment for nations now independent but still fragile.

Cohen died in office on 17 June 1968, in London, at the age of fifty-eight, worn out by a career of rare intensity and perhaps by the contradictions that every well-intentioned reformer must bear within an apparatus that exceeds his intentions alone. He did not live to see the fruits of the institution he had helped to build. His honours — KCMG (Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George), KCVO (Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order) and OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) — translate, in the language of British honours, the recognition of a career that had profoundly marked the institutions of the Empire and then of the nascent Commonwealth. They do not, however, exhaust the significance of this life.

The surname Cohen is not limited, in Jewish memory, to figures of public service: it is also one of the great names of modern Jewish philosophy. Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), founder of the Neo-Kantian school of Marburg, offers its major illustration. His posthumous work, Religion of Reason Drawn from the Sources of Judaism, undertook to extract from Judaism a religion of reason, founded on the idea of a unique God guarantor of morality and on the correlation between God and man [H. Cohen, 1919 ; H. Cohen, French ed. 1994]. The debate that opposed him to Franz Rosenzweig over the future of German Jewish thought remains one of the decisive moments of twentieth-century religious philosophy [Bienenstock, 2009].

No direct filiation is established between the philosopher of Marburg and the governor of Uganda; it would be dishonest to suggest one. But the rapprochement is not gratuitous: it illuminates what the name Cohen carried of the most elevated in modern ethical thought. In Hermann Cohen, religion resolves itself into an ethic of universal responsibility, and the neighbour — including the stranger — becomes the very place of moral revelation. Now it is precisely this ethic that Andrew Cohen put into action in colonial administration and in development aid, and which he had articulated, as early as 1947, in the report that bore his name.

In the Sephardic and North African world, other lineages bearing the same priestly consonance — the Ankawa, the Encaoua — gave Moroccan and Algerian Jewry foremost rabbinical figures, illustrating how the vocation of the kohen was diversely expressed according to diasporic contexts: Talmudic learning and halakhic authority on one hand, service of the State and thought of development on the other. These families share with the London branch no established blood tie; they illuminate by contrast what priestly vocation has meant across the continents. The surname Cohen, declined in innumerable variants — Cohen, Kohen, Kahn, Cahen, Cohn — traverses all diasporas and remains, everywhere, charged with the same memory: that of Aaron, brother of Moses, keeper of a function of blessing, sanctification and service. The work of Joseph Toledano on Jewish family names reminds us how this surname, in the North African world, is tied sometimes to lineages genuinely aware of their priestly descent, sometimes to families for which the surname became fixed by other means, without the priestly continuity always being demonstrable [Toledano, 2003 ; Toledano, 1999]. This caution applies to the London branch: nothing, in the documentary state of Andrew Cohen's lineage, permits us to affirm an unbroken filiation with the Aaronid caste. On the other hand, the symbolic charge of the name illuminates a constant that the preceding chapters have verified from the sources: the propensity toward public service, mediation and collective responsibility.

Levy Barent Cohen (c. 1740–1808). In Hebrew: לוי ברנד כהן. Merchant and Jewish notable of Dutch origin established in London, Levy Barent Cohen constitutes the documented root of the English lineage from which Sir Andrew Benjamin Cohen descended. A respected figure in the London Jewish community at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he was connected, through his descendants, to the great families of Victorian British Jewish aristocracy, including the Montefiore. His network of family alliances laid the foundation of an acculturated English Jewish bourgeoisie that would, within two generations, rise to the highest positions in British public life.

Sir Andrew Benjamin Cohen (1909–1968). Central figure of this book. Born in Berkhamsted on October 7, 1909, died in London on June 17, 1968. Educated at Malvern College and Trinity College, Cambridge, he entered the Colonial Office after a stint at the Inland Revenue, organized the provisioning of Malta during the Second World War, drafted in 1947 the Cohen Report on constitutional advance in Africa, served as governor of Uganda from 1952 to 1957, represented the United Kingdom on the UN Trusteeship Council from 1957 to 1961, published in 1959 British Policy in Changing Africa, and from 1961 until his death in 1968 headed what became the Ministry of Overseas Development. Appointed KCMG, KCVO and OBE, he left in the British colonial archives and in the institutional history of decolonization a documented and substantial imprint.

Ruth Louisa Cohen (1906–1991). Sister of Sir Andrew Benjamin Cohen, British economist specializing in agricultural economics, she was the first woman to direct a college of the University of Cambridge: Newnham College, which she led from 1954 to 1972. Her work in rural economics established her authority in British academic circles. She illustrates, in the university domain, the same symbolic breach of institutional ceilings that her brother sought to effect in colonial administration: two children of the same English Jewish family, two pioneers, each in their own field.

Arthur Creech Jones (1891–1964). Non-Jewish, but an indispensable intellectual partner for understanding the 1947 Cohen Report. Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1946 to 1950, a figure of Fabian socialism, founder and driving force of the Fabian Society's colonial bureau in 1940, he was the principal commissioner and political promoter of the report that Cohen drafted. His conviction that indirect rule had to be superseded aligned with Cohen's, and it was from the duo they formed that the founding document of British decolonization policy in Africa was born.

Mutesa II, Kabaka of Buganda (1924–1969). Edward Mutesa II, called "Kabaka Freddie," king of Buganda. His relationship with Andrew Cohen was one of the most dramatic episodes of the Uganda mandate: exiled to London by the governor's decision in November 1953, he was restored in October 1955 after Baganda resistance forced Cohen to negotiate the 1955 Buganda Agreement. He became the first president of independent Uganda in 1962 and died in exile in London in 1969. His figure, in mirror of Cohen's, embodies the limits and contradictions of colonial reformism: the administrator who wished to be an emancipator was also, for a time, the exiler of a king.

Abu Mayanja (c. 1929–2005). Ugandan student whom Cohen favored in his access to Cambridge, Abu Mayanja was one of the first secretaries general of the Ugandan National Congress, a party founded in 1952. A figure of the generation formed between two worlds — Baganda tradition and the British university — he concretely illustrates Cohen's philosophy: training African elites capable of assuming the responsibilities of power was, for the governor, the sine qua non condition of any viable independence. His career gives substance to a conviction that, without him, would remain abstract.

Hermann Cohen (1842–1918). In Hebrew: הֶרְמַן כֹּהֵן. German Jewish philosopher, born in Coswig (Anhalt), died in Berlin. Founder of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism, he is the author of Religion of Reason Drawn from the Sources of Judaism, a work published posthumously in 1919, which attempts to ground a universal ethics in the sources of Judaism. Although no genealogical kinship connects him to the London branch, his name illuminates what the patronym Cohen has carried of the highest in modern ethical thought: the idea that the encounter with the stranger is the very place of moral revelation, a philosophical echo of Andrew Cohen's action in the public arena.

From the mercantile stock of Levy Barent Cohen, established in London at the turn of the nineteenth century, to the death in office of Sir Andrew Benjamin Cohen in 1968, the lineage traced in this book will have traversed two centuries of British and world history, leaving there a documented and substantial mark. What this family will have expressed, among all virtues, most of all is concern for justice toward the other and the stranger, extended into an ethic of public responsibility. The kohen, in tradition, stood between the people and the altar to transmit the blessing; Andrew Cohen, author of a visionary administrative report in 1947, reforming governor of Uganda, author in 1959 of British Policy in Changing Africa, then first leader of the development ministry, stood between the powers and the administered peoples to prepare their emancipation and organize solidarity among nations.

The 1947 Report remains the centerpiece of the file: it reveals that before being a field administrator, Cohen was an architect of colonial political thought. His doctrine of four stages of constitutional advancement, his rejection of indirect rule as reactionary imperialism, his conviction that African elites trained at the finest universities must take in hand the destinies of their peoples — all of this outlined, as early as 1947, a horizon that history would partially confirm and partially contradict. Decolonization proved in reality more brutal, faster, and more chaotic than Cohen had envisioned, and his own compromises — on Rhodesia, on the Kabaka — testify that the reformer was not exempt from the contradictions of the system he served.

This virtue was not without shadows: historical honesty demands we acknowledge it. But the underlying orientation remains constant. Cohen was, in the celebrated phrase of historian Robinson, a "proconsul of African nationalism" — an ambivalent formulation, which says both the limits of the figure (a proconsul remains a delegate of the Empire) and his originality (to make him the supporter of nationalism is to reverse the expected logic of the colonial official). Distant heir of a minority long exiled and subject, documented descendant of Levy Barent Cohen, he placed his authority in the service of the dignity of others. In this, without any continuous lineage with the Aaronite caste being demonstrable, the house Cohen rejoins the collective memory of Israel — that long lineage which, from ancient priesthood to Hermann Cohen's ethics and maimonidean tsedaka, has made care for the stranger the very measure of justice. The name, here, will not have belied its vocation.