Britain should finally admit that the sun has set on empire

At first the letters from what was then Rhodesia were peppered with mentions of “Good ol’ Smithy”. few years after independence, when nothing had yet been done to disturb the privileged lives of the white population, the letters from Zimbabwe began to make glancing references to “Good ol’ Mugabe”.

Now, following the euphoria that greeted the ejection of president Robert Mugabe, I wonder if my correspondent, who I never met, might refer to “Good ol’ Emmerson”.

The letter writer was the daughter of a Rhodesian tobacco farmer who, after I had left SA, married my best friend. But the marriage did not last.

He was a hard-drinking rebel while his wife was clearly very conventional; so dutiful, indeed, that when her husband proved to be a hopeless letter writer, she took that chore upon herself. Eventually, she returned to Rhodesia and remarried, all the while continuing to write with no apparent irony in her shifts of loyalty.

Today, such is the relief at the departure of Mugabe that the elevation of his longtime ruthless henchman has been largely welcomed by both black and white Zimbabweans. For the moment, most are prepared to overlook Emmerson Mnangagwa’s role in crushing protests, rigging elections and, above all, the massacres in Matabeleland that claimed at least 20,000 lives.

But if there is a temporary myopia regarding recent history, the same is true in the former colonial power, where a cosy glow is increasingly being cast over the story of empire. This is manifested in the almost complete amnesia on the British role in what today is Zimbabwe.

And of late in the UK, there has been even less realism in many ways than just more than half-a-century ago. In 1960 during Harold Macmillan’s six-week tour of colonies in Africa that culminated in his famous “Wind of Change” speech in Cape Town, an irritable Macmillan privately referred to African nationalists as “barbarians”.

However, the patrician prime minister was acutely aware of the chilly postwar gusts blowing major changes throughout the world, especially in Africa, but also for his own country.

Assessing Britain’s declining power, Macmillan was partial to the GreekRoman analogy.

He fondly imagined that Britain could play the role of seasoned classical Greece to the assertive new Roman Empire, the US (“big, vulgar, bustling”, he called it).

It’s an affectation that still deludes many Britons into believing that the influence of their former empire somehow lingers on, despite the evidence.

Ten years after leaving SA, I arrived in London in 1980 to work on Fleet Street.

One of my first newspaper assignments was early on a chilly morning at a distant corner of Heathrow Airport, where the prime minister was due to greet the return of Britain’s last governor of Rhodesia. It was an historic moment: Britain had divested herself of her final colony in Africa.

Margaret Thatcher, relieved that the transition to an independent Zimbabwe had gone peacefully, was grateful to the portly Lord Soames, Winston Churchill’s son-in-law.

A declassified memo reveals that the prime minister’s press secretary advised her: “There will be very considerable pressradio-TV interest in this.”

THERE HAS BEEN AN UPSURGE OF NATIONALIST SENTIMENT AND MUCH HUFFING AND PUFFING ABOUT ‘MAKING BRITAIN GREAT AGAIN’

How wrong he was. There were no more than half a dozen journalists huddled on the tarmac to witness Thatcher congratulating Lord Soames, whom the memo calls “the conquering hero”.

The curtain was coming down on the empire — and this was the penultimate act.

Yet by that point, apart from an occasional burst of chauvinistic bravado, the British had largely lost interest. It had been a swift decline. Since the end of Second World War, the number of colonial subjects under British control had shrunk by about 700-million.

And like those dwindling imperial domains, attitudes also rapidly narrowed.

Only a few months after I was born the British were still confident enough to pass the 1948 British Nationality Act, which guaranteed all empire citizens the right of entry into Britain, with the right to work.

Thereafter, access was steadily eroded as the island withdrew into itself and attempted to winch up the national drawbridge to shut out the aftershock of having subjugated a quarter of the globe. Inevitably, those aftershocks linger on — as, stubbornly, do the illusions.

The irony is that as Britain’s global role and influence shrinks ever further, there has been an upsurge of nationalist sentiment and much huffing and puffing about “making Britain great again”.

Modern amnesia has led to a deluded impression of British influence in the 21st century.