[A-List] UK imperialism: South Africa & decolonisation

[Michael Keaney]

Jingoes
R.W. Johnson
The Lion and the Springbok: Britain and South Africa since the Boer War by
Ronald Hyam and Peter Henshaw
Cambridge, 379 pp, £45.00
London Review of Books, vol.26, no. 9, 6 May 2004

This book begins with real passion as Ronald Hyam and Peter Henshaw lash
into those historians who they believe have made unwarranted assumptions
about the links between Britain and South Africa: to wit, that Britain
fought the Boer War to get its hands on the gold and that economic
considerations remained the motivating force in its difficult relationship
with South Africa thereafter. Early on, they single out their adversaries
as, pre-eminently, Shula Marks, Geoff Berridge and Jack Spence. 'For some
scholars, no doubt, archival work is logistically too difficult or
temperamentally uncongenial. Such must survive by their theorising, and hope
to invent a concept which catches on. But history is too important to be
left to the stay-at-home theorisers.'

This is fighting talk, but The Lion and the Springbok soon subsides into a
conventional but illuminating archival study, aimed above all at showing
that British policy towards South Africa was guided by more than mere
economic concerns, and that despite the many occasions on which it has drawn
condemnation - the granting of self-government to a whites-only regime; the
exiling in 1950 of Seretse Khama, then the heir to the Bangwato chieftaincy
and eventually the first president of Botswana, for marrying a white woman;
the refusal to take a tougher line against apartheid - it has been
essentially vindicated by the current harmonious relationship with an
ANC-ruled South Africa, back within the Commonwealth. If the book has a hero
it is Sir John Maud, the British high commissioner who advised in 1960 that
since a black government must come to power one day, Britain must 'keep
faith' with the black majority, while at the same time not antagonising the
National Party government to no good purpose: we must, he said, walk a
tightrope through civil war, revolution and any other form of mayhem, and be
waiting at the end to embrace the winner.

'Some sort of war might well have broken out in 1899 even if gold had never
been discovered in the Transvaal in 1886,' Hyam and Henshaw write, but it is
in the nature of counterfactuals that they can't be settled beyond doubt.
Indeed, the authors' sustained attempt to suggest that Britain's attitude to
South Africa was never primarily motivated by its being the world's largest
gold producer is rather like insisting that the US attitude towards Iraq
never had anything to do with oil. Why in any case would it be wrong for
Britain to have such a motive? Why be shy of acknowledging economic
considerations as part of a defensible national interest? Hyam and Henshaw
appear not to be interested in these questions, yet gold production was of
legitimate concern to Britain, the world's banker in 1900, with a gold
standard to maintain, just as oil supplies are a legitimate concern for an
American president. Imagine what would happen if George W. - or any other
American president bent on intervention in the Middle East - not only said
he wasn't concerned with America's oil supplies but actually meant it.

Hyam and Henshaw write sensitively and with great perspicacity about the
pretend reconciliation between the British and the Boers after the Boer War,
while both were privately determined to win the peace. In a confidential
memorandum in 1906, Churchill acknowledged that the British could hardly
count on the goodwill of the Boers 'when we remember that twenty thousand of
their women and children perished in our concentration camps', and so there
'absolutely' had to be 'a numerical majority of a loyal and English
population' in South Africa. Later, he was so alarmed at having given the
game away that every single official file which ought to contain a copy of
this memo now has a note reading 'removed by Mr Churchill' - a unique
instance. Unfortunately, his son Randolph found the original in Churchill's
private papers, and filial impiety did the rest. British politicians' real
mistake, however, was to believe that English-speaking voters would behave
with the same solidarity as Afrikaners. There was never the slightest chance
of this, for British immigrants to South Africa had brought with them the
differences of opinion and allegiance which had divided them in Britain, and
they were anyway too individualist to be whipped conveniently into line like
the jingoes Westminster politicians imagined them to be. Afrikaner leaders
were therefore immediately back at the helm: with the death of Rhodes there
was no English-speaking politician to rival their sharp-eyed vision and
visceral determination. 'We have great influence; but power has passed,'
Churchill soon realised.

By 1910, British politicians were facing a fait accompli: an all-white
national convention had agreed on the form and constitution of the new South
Africa. The UK government was well aware that to grant full self-government
to the Union was to expose the African majority to all the rigours of white
supremacy. They felt uncomfortable about this, but consoled themselves with
the fact that Britain still controlled the three protectorates, Swaziland,
Basutoland and Bechuanaland: at least these could be kept free of Boer
control. Hyam and Henshaw's main interest is to show how much this
mattered - looking after the protectorates became a way of erasing a bad
conscience over the betrayal of South Africa's black majority.

White South Africa had a remarkable territorial appetite. Jan Smuts, who,
well before becoming a Boer general, let alone the great statesman of
Anglo-Boer reconciliation, was making it plain that the conquest of the
interior by Boer trekkers should be seen as merely a beginning. Ahead lay a
greater South Africa, encompassing not only the three protectorates but
South-West Africa, Southern Rhodesia and southern Mozambique. Even this was
not enough. South Africa was, he pointed out, connected by a single
mountainous plateau to East Africa: the 'broad backbone' of a future white
superstate. For this, he said,
is one of the richest parts of the world and only wants white brains and
capital to become enormously productive. But the present tendencies seem all
in favour of the native and the Indian, and the danger is that one of the
greatest chances in our history will be missed. The cry should be 'the
highlands to the whites' and a resolute white policy should be pursued. The
fruits of such a policy will be a white state in time more important than
Australia . . . a chain of white states which will in the end become one
from the Union to Kenya.

This explains why Smuts and Louis Botha were willing to risk a full-scale
Boer rebellion by declaring war on Germany alongside Britain in 1914: it
would give them a pretext to invade German South-West Africa, which they
duly did in 1915. The colonial secretary of the day, Lord Harcourt, tried to
warn the cabinet that 'we could never take the bone out of the dog's
mouth' - and indeed, Namibia remained South African until 1990. For Smuts
this was just a start. From the early 1920s on, he tried to coax Rhodesia
into the Union and dispatched missions to report on the situation in Kenya
and Tanganyika. He brushed aside as merely 'stupid' the 1930 White Paper
which declared the paramountcy of African interests in East Africa,
deploring 'the somewhat negrophilistic temper which is about today' and
enthusing that the white settlers in East Africa were of 'an extraordinarily
good type'.

Smuts, rather than Nelson Mandela, was South Africa's man of the century:
from 1895 to 1948, his enormous energy was brought to bear continuously on
the shape and future of the country. It is only when one realises this, and
knows what Smuts was thinking, that one understands why South Africa is the
only country in the world to bear such a presumptuous name, as though it
represented half a continent. Botha and Smuts intended to make that a
reality: one day - the sooner the better - the country would incorporate the
whole continent south of the equator, for if they had established their
white settler 'backbone' stretching all the way to Kenya, it's hard to
imagine that the Congo and Angola would have escaped.

Such a settler state, including not only most of the planet's gold,
diamonds, platinum, copper and uranium but also vast reserves of oil, gas,
coal and much else besides, would undoubtedly have become a major player in
world history. What the 21st-century mind struggles to understand seemed
natural in the early 20th century: that a handful of whites could thus
incorporate many times their number of subject Africans in the confident
expectation that demography alone would never count for anything. Hyam and
Henshaw point out that for the first fifty years of South African
independence, Afrikaners wondered what on earth to do with the South African
English; and for the next forty years whites debated what to do about the
blacks. Only jokers suggested that there might be a time when blacks debated
what to do with the whites.

Although the 1922 Rhodesian referendum rejecting union with South Africa put
an end to Smuts's continental aspirations, he saw it as only a temporary
setback, and the moment he joined Britain's war effort in 1939 - at the cost
of another Boer rebellion - he demanded Swaziland as his price, with the
implication that a great deal more would follow. The Nationalists' appetite
for territorial gain was just as strong, and when they succeeded Smuts in
1948 it was fed by two further considerations: a furious resentment that
Britain should so obviously not trust them not to behave barbarously to any
black population they took over; and a keen perception that the three
protectorates would fit perfectly into the scheme for a ring of satellite
Bantustans, even allowing South Africa to decant some of its own black
population into them. Successive British governments, concerned that a flat
refusal to hand the protectorates over to Pretoria might trigger a
confrontation and an act of force majeure which London would be unable to
resist, decided to play the South Africans along, never quite ruling out the
possibility that the protectorates might become part of a greater South
Africa, but always refusing to let it happen in practice.

British politicians regarded Smuts with a respect tinged with awe: he was a
doughty opponent who had become Britain's strongest supporter and a member
of the imperial war cabinet in both world wars. Within Tory ranks, indeed,
there was always a group which felt that should some mishap befall
Churchill, Smuts, not Eden, would be the leader to turn to. But other South
African politicians inspired the deepest contempt. When Hertzog replaced
Smuts in 1924, Lord Selborne, previously the high commissioner, wrote that
he intended to build an Afrikaner state 'no more advanced than Elizabethan
England', which would treat every African as a 'helot of the chosen people'.
Forty years later, Sir John Maud said that Afrikanerdom had somehow 'managed
to miss the spirit of the century. To a Western European it seems to owe
more to the 17th century than the 20th century - though there is an ominous
Hitlerian smell about it.' Maud particularly loathed South Africa's foreign
minister, Eric Louw: 'an unprepossessing and neurotic figure, so
disturbingly reminiscent of Dr Goebbels'. He advised Macmillan that
Verwoerdism was bound to fail 'for the simple reason that it is not only
evil but cannot be made to fit the facts: it is a policy for putting back in
their shells eggs which were broken long ago when South Africa first began
to become industrialised.'

It was, however, an exaggerated respect for Smuts that led Britain into its
worst blunder, the Seretse Khama affair (see below). 'If there is one thing
on which all South Africans are agreed, it is . . . that racial blood
mixture is an evil,' Smuts warned when it was first suggested that Khama
wished to marry Ruth Williams, a white woman. This was enough to panic the
postwar Labour government, and when Churchill returned to power Smuts
advised him that the Khama case was 'full of dynamite'. The affair has come
to look steadily worse. British politicians tried every ruse to persuade
Khama out of his marriage: they convinced themselves that South Africa might
leave the Commonwealth; they prevented Khama from returning home; they
flatly lied to the Commons in saying that they had taken no account of South
African (white) sensitivities about mixed marriages; they persuaded
themselves that Khama would make a hopeless leader of his country, when he
was in fact the best leader that any African country then had - and so on.
Patrick Gordon-Walker emerges with the most discredit. Pretty much the only
man to keep his head was Attlee himself, who remarked on the absurdity of
the case from the outset: 'It is as if we had been obliged to agree to
Edward VIII's abdication so as not to annoy the Irish Free State and the
USA.' Hyam and Henshaw are so keen to sympathise with imperial policy-makers
that they effectively side with Gordon-Walker; they even say of other
studies of the episode that they are 'marred' by too much sympathy with
Khama's resentment at the treatment he received. Yet the wonder is that
Khama did not lead Botswana straight out of the Commonwealth, cursing
London's hypocrisy and racism as he went.

The supposition behind the Khama case was wrong from the start. When the
Nationalists came to power, liaisons across the colour line were ten a
penny: the government were not going to break off relations with Britain
over a mere symbolic divide. Severance from the sterling area had
effectively brought down the first Nationalist government in the 1930s: it
had been a bitter lesson and they were determined not to repeat the mistake.
What mattered far more were the looming signs that Britain might grant
self-government to its African colonies. In 1955 Louw tried to bully Alec
Douglas-Home, then a minister at the Commonwealth Relations Office, into
joining with South Africa in an all-African conference of white powers,
threatening that he would take South Africa 'into isolation' if Douglas-Home
would not agree. Douglas-Home, to his credit, sent him away with a flea in
his ear. To be sure, Britain shielded South Africa from the ever growing
opposition to its policies at the UN, but this was largely a matter of
self-interest: with many colonies still in Africa, Britain had a great deal
to lose should the UN have been allowed to intrude into the internal affairs
of African countries.

Managing the relationship with apartheid South Africa was a tough test of
British politicians. If Gordon-Walker egregiously failed it, so did
Churchill, who nourished many fond illusions, among them that in the event
the Nationalists were to throw the Royal Navy out of its base at Simonstown,
it might retreat to Durban, secure within Natal, the 'loyal Ulster of South
Africa'. It has long been assumed that Macmillan, with his 'wind of change'
speech to Parliament in Cape Town, was master of the situation, but Hyam and
Henshaw's examination of the fateful 1961 Commonwealth conference, when
Verwoerd withdrew South Africa's membership, reveals a weak and fretful
Macmillan, regretting his own speech: 'The wind of change has blown us
away,' he lamented to Maud.

Two men alone kept their cool. The idea of a Central African Federation,
dreamed up with the best intentions, was a goner from the start, but it
attracted many passionate Labour and Tory supporters. As early as 1952,
Attlee visited central Africa and, while admitting that the scheme was fine
in principle, came flatly down against it because it would start 'under bad
auspices and with bad feelings', seeking as it did artificially to freeze
the pace of African political development. Had such horse sense only been
listened to, a decade of rejection, repression and failure might have been
averted. The second was Douglas-Home, who in 1959 addressed a strong
personal minute to Macmillan, arguing - two years before the event - that
the Commonwealth 'would undoubtedly be happier and closer-knit were the ugly
duckling out of the nest'. Sad though it might be, he argued, Britain had to
start taking a tougher line against South Africa at the UN because it had
become 'a liability to the West'. In effect, Douglas-Home pushed Macmillan
into making the 'wind of change' speech, but Macmillan lacked the steel to
stand by it. At the 1961 conference, the great fear was that the Ghanaian
leader, Kwame Nkrumah, would lead a radical charge against South Africa: in
fact, he was the soul of moderation and compromise and sought ways to keep
South Africa in. The two hard men were both conservatives - Canada's John
Diefenbaker and, above all, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa of Nigeria - with
Douglas-Home applauding discreetly in the background.

Hyam and Henshaw effectively end their study with South Africa's exit from
the Commonwealth, adding only a short epilogue to bring the story up to its
1994 re-entry. Their frontispiece shows Nelson Mandela on his 2001 visit to
Hyam's Cambridge college, when he talked happily of the 'unbreakable bonds'
between the two countries. While they certainly show that a great deal more
was at stake in the relationship - Britain's concern for the three High
Commission territories in particular - than a simple economic determinism
might allow, there are two large holes.

First, there is no assessment of Britain's relationship with the exiled ANC.
Just consider: from the early 1960s on, its headquarters were in London
while it was conducting a campaign of sabotage and terror against the
Pretoria government, not scrupling to blow up and mutilate civilians. To do
this it worked with the active co-operation of Cuba, the USSR, East Germany
and the rest of the Soviet bloc, ferrying large numbers of guerrillas in one
direction for training, and receiving equally large consignments of weapons
and 'trainers' in the other. All this to carry out a campaign against a
country with more than 750,000 British citizens and many billions of pounds
of British investment. There was no precedent for Britain allowing such a
movement to operate, certainly not against targets where it had such large
interests at stake. To put it mildly, this is a subject worthy of more
consideration.

Second, it would be folly to assume that Britain really feels comfortable
with an ANC government which has sent hundreds of thousands of its people
scurrying to the security of British shores, which claims to see Cuba as the
world's most perfect democracy, and which has supported Mugabe à l'outrance.
Thabo Mbeki has made it clear that he believes there is an Anglo-American
conspiracy to overthrow the ANC, while Blair, for his part, has treated
Mbeki with contempt in insisting that on the crucial issue of Zimbabwe, the
South African president is no longer to be taken seriously. And yet, no
sooner has the ANC been re-elected with 70 per cent of the vote than the
British government is quick to profess how delighted it is and how much it
looks forward to working with Mbeki again. The point is not to argue who is
right, but merely that history didn't stop in 1961 or 1994. The relationship
between South Africa and Britain is difficult and densely textured - then
and now.

Seretse Khama

Seretse Khama, the heir to the Bangwato chieftaincy, was sent to Oxford to
study by the Bangwato elders. Balliol completely messed up his education -
they devised a special course for him only to discover that he couldn't get
a degree that way - so he went to London to study law instead. Here he met
Ruth Williams, a clerk in a Lloyds' underwriter's office. They married in
1948. After the marriage, the British government tried to persuade Khama to
give up the succession to the chieftaincy. Patrick Gordon-Walker, then
parliamentary under-secretary for Commonwealth relations, suggested that a
rule be made that no chief could have a white wife. The minister for
Commonwealth relations, Philip Noel-Baker, was planning a period of direct
administration, and Khama was not allowed to take up the chieftaincy. In
July 1949, the government set up a judicial inquiry into the matter under
Justice Sir Walter Harrigan. Harrigan found that allegations that Khama was
both a heavy drinker and corrupt were wholly untrue, and that his prospects
for success were 'as bright as any native we know', but because of his
'unfortunate marriage' he was 'not fit in present circumstances' to be
chief. He should be recognised as chief, however, in the event of 'changed
circumstances' - i.e. if he were to agree to divorce.

Khama was summoned to Britain, leaving Ruth pregnant in Bechuanaland.
Noel-Baker and Gordon-Walker offered him £1100 a year if he would relinquish
his claim to the chieftaincy and live in Britain. He refused: 'I can't, my
tribe has elected me.' Gordon-Walker, who had by now replaced Noel-Baker as
minister, got the cabinet to agree that since Khama was being
'irresponsible', he must be formally forbidden to return home for five
years. Khama was furious and told the press. Gordon-Walker denounced him.
The Tories made a fuss in Parliament, and Churchill questioned whether
Seretse was being treated fairly 'as between man and man'. When
Gordon-Walker said there had been no contact with South Africa over the
matter (in fact there had been strong and continuous pressure from South
Africa), Churchill called it 'very disreputable'. Quintin Hogg argued that
'our long-run future' in Africa 'depends on the confidence with which we are
regarded by Africans'. Seven Labour MPs, led by Fenner Brockway, voted with
the Tories. Sir Arthur Lewis resigned in disgust from the Colonial Economic
Development Council; Leary Constantine joined the Seretse Khama Fighting
Committee; Krishna Menon denounced the British government for racism.
Gordon-Walker announced that he 'was more convinced than ever' of the
rightness of his policy. He had persuaded himself that recognising Khama as
chief would lead to South Africa grabbing all three High Commission
territories and quitting the Commonwealth, which would 'inestimably weaken
us in any war with Russia'.

When the Tories came to power they consulted Smuts and decided in their turn
that Khama was 'not a fit and proper person' to be a chief. In the end he
was allowed to return to Bechuanaland with Ruth in 1956, as a private
person. He founded the Bechuanaland Democratic Party in 1962, became prime
minister in 1965, and the first president of Botswana in 1966. He and Ruth
had four children, one of whom, Ian, is now vice-president of Botswana and
will be the next president. After Seretse's death in 1980, Ruth continued to
live in Botswana until she died two years ago. Khama is remembered as a
great and good man. Botswana, one of the world's ten poorest countries when
he became president, has now overtaken South Africa in GDP per capita and
aims to achieve European levels of income and welfare by 2016. I know of no
other African country in which a former president is held in such genuine
affection.