Elizabeth, an agent of British ‘soft’power
The reign of Queen Elizabeth II saw Britain move to put a positive spin on its former colonial project
The age of Elizabeth II has come to an end. Her son, to reign as Charles III, is the new British monarch. A change in the royal family in the era where republicanism and democracy have gained universal acceptance, and rulership by birth has become archaic, should yield little interest. Yet it is hard to ignore the legacy of British rule over the native inhabitants of South Africa.
Elizabeth II did not found the British empire. Nor did she preside over its extension to Southern Africa. It was her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, who did so. Victoria’s first cousin was the Belgian king, Leopold II, whose rule over the Congo created economic and social prosperity for Belgium but brought utter ruin for the Africans there.
Victoria’s reign was the most consequential for Southern Africa. She built the British empire. It was during her reign that the British came to create and dominate the world trade in gold and diamonds.
When Victoria died in 1901, the British had opened a new frontier of war, not against the indigenous people of South Africa but with another occupying force, descendants of the Dutch, the Afrikaners. That war ended in defeat for the Afrikaners but it created conditions for the establishment of a white racial oligarchy that would rule South Africa until 1994.
Alfred Xuma, the president of the ANC, observed that apartheid was simply a variation of white rule, not its invention.
Victoria’s success in the consolidation of the British empire is evident not only by the vastness of the territory that the British acquired under her reign but at the social, cultural and normative changes to the people affected by British rule. Their language, religion and cultural aspirations were so fundamentally changed that even the language of protest against the colonial empire mimicked the aesthetics of the empire itself. African deputations and petitions by the Victorian-educated African elite to England proclaimed their status as “African children of the Empire”. Inyembezi zika Vitoliya (“Victoria’s tears”, hard alcohol) entered the isixhosa vocabulary as something pleasurable despite its destruction.
It was in the Victorian era that the British annexed Transvaal, placing the Pedi and the Boers under their control; finally defeated the Xhosa in 1878, and in the brutal wars of Natal in 1879 avenged their defeat at Isandlwana and colonised the Zulus under the British sphere of influence.
When the deposed king of the Zulus, Cetshwayo ka Mpande, visited England in 1882 to plead for the restoration of his kingdom, it was with Victoria that he met, a meeting which left him a vassal king, compelled to enforce imperial desires and wishes over the Zulu people.
Victorianism was good for business too. Not only did British citizens Cecil John Rhodes and Barney Barnato influence the diamond and gold trade in the Cape and Transvaal, but their fortunes were amassed with the help of the imperial government, becoming super-rich capitalists.
When Rhodes duped the king of the Ndebele, Lobengula, to obtain the mineral-rich land of the Ndebele, he could rely on Victoria to sponsor a war and to declare the land as “Crown land”, controlled by Rhodes.
In South Africa, what had begun 50 years earlier as a truce out of the “Anglo-boer” war in 1901 had consolidated into apartheid. Although no longer a formal colonial power, British influence in politics and social and economic infrastructure were evident. British possessions acquired under colonialism remained intact.
When Elizabeth became queen in 1953, the empire was at an ebb. India had successfully agitated for independence. The opponents of British interests, such as the Mau-mau in Kenya, were also fought with brutality.
Caroline Elkins in her book, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, has shown the depraved violence of British soldiers in the suppression of the Mau-mau fight for freedom, such as the torture of detainees in Kenyan concentration camps.
The complicity of the British government in the violence resulted in a successful class action lawsuit for reparations that was only resolved a couple of years ago, in British courts.
Elizabeth’s first prime minister, Winston Churchill, was an archimperialist. Towards the end of World War II, he had resisted attempts by the president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, to extend the central principle of the Atlantic Charter — all people shall have a right to selfdetermination — to Africans under British rule. Churchill was not prepared to “preside over the liquidation of the British empire”.
Elizabeth’s declaration in Cape Town, when she was 21, that she would devote her life to “the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong” would have done nothing to assure the native people of South Africa of her commitment towards their freedom from apartheid.
Elizabeth, unlike Victoria, presided over the transformation of Britain’s relations with its former colonies. The British government was no longer interested in imposing its own governors to rule the colonies. The colonies could be independent, provided that their newfound freedom would not threaten Britain’s economic interests.
Hence many constitutions of the newly independent states of Africa in the 1960s protected private property — assets obtained under colonial rule by European corporations and individuals, including land. The “commonwealth of nations” enabled Britain to continue overseeing her interests in the former colonies.
The approach of the British government towards the natives of South Africa did not change significantly in the early decades of apartheid. Paul Landau’s recent book, Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries, lays bare the collaboration between the apartheid intelligence services, the British foreign intelligence service, known as MI6, and the United State’s CIA, which worked to foil the efforts of the ANC’S freedom fighters from as far afield as Botswana.
Bob de Quehen of MI6 watched Africa’s clamour for independence, with “asperity and trepidation” and it was the CIA’S Durban agent, Don Rickard, who provided information to the local security branch leading to the arrest of Nelson Mandela near Howick on 5 August 1962. Her Majesty’s government was preaching one thing and doing the opposite. Prime minister Harold Macmillan was talking about the “wind of change” but Her Majesty’s agents were working to preserve British hegemony in Africa.
The greatest impact of Elizabeth has not been to influence the change of British policy towards the native people of South Africa but to make British soft power more palatable to the former colonies and the world.
The complexity of the world brought about by the end of the Cold War and the emergence of China as a global power with an interest in Africa demanded a new approach.
A new vocabulary, new normative systems and new cultural norms were emerging. History books such as Niall Fergusson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World repackaged the story of empire. Now, British colonial power was projected as a good thing, including for the inhabitants of the formerly colonised territories.
The “civilising mission”, which was the justification of most of the atrocities committed by the British in Africa, was now replaced with apparently neutral terms such as “progress”, “modernity” and “the free world”.
The British empire remains in diffuse, invisible but significant forms. Elizabeth’s last prime minister, Liz Truss, appointed the first chancellor of the exchequer with Ghanaian roots, Kwasi Kwarteng, itself evidence of the mastery of British imperial adaptability to new conditions.
A few years ago, Kwarteng published the acclaimed Ghosts of
Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World, in which he examines the shameful legacy of the British in Asia and West Africa. He would recall, too, Elizabeth’s ambivalence towards the independence of Ghana.
Much of the poverty of black Africans is attributable to the policies of the British empire: the institution of slavery; the violent seizure of the land; the confiscation of cattle; the extraction of minerals and forced labour in British-controlled firms.
These have created a life of affluence for British citizens and massive wealth for British corporations. Those legacies have proved difficult to reverse with conventional policies.
Perhaps first on the agenda of the new monarch, Charles III, is to go beyond the Elizabethan modus operandi of lip service to the plight of Africa; accepting the “wrongs of the past” yet never committing to tangible corrective action.
England could look at how Germany is attempting to exorcise its own imperial demons in Namibia by putting its money where its mouth is: paying reparations to the indigens for the wrongs of the colonial era.
Empty gestures about “strengthening trade relations with Africa” where there are embedded structural trade imbalances as a result of historical practices will not erase the stain of colonial plunder of African resources.
Land Matters: South Africa’s Failed Land Reforms and the Road Ahead.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the