Thank goodness for this light royal distraction

Amid the tidal wave of bad news South Africans have had to endure over the past few weeks comes tidings of an edifying and uplifting variety. So take a bow SA, as we welcome to our shores the hippest, sassiest and most unconventional of British royals, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, with four-month-old Archie in tow — Archie Harrison, no title. From tomorrow, South Africans will have Prince Harry and his TV-star philanthropist wife Meghan Markle to brighten our news pages and TV screens. And none too soon, either. It is a light diversion that couldn’t have come at a better time.

There was a time when we had to take the British royals seriously. They even ruled us! In 1947, when the royals came to SA they travelled 7,000km, visited 400 towns and spoke to 25,000 people, according to a report on that tour. The report said: “They were cheered by millions of people of all races as they travelled through the country in the White Train, with short trips in a Daimler.”

Of course there will be diehard republicans who insist that royalty has no place in a democratic society, and that the royals represent the scourge of inherited privilege.

Certainly one person in SA in 1947 failed to wave a flag for the Empire and get into the spirit of the occasion — the dour editor of Die Transvaler newspaper, HF Verwoerd, who would later become prime minister with such disastrous consequences. His newspaper conspicuously avoided mentioning the royals, but on the day they visited Johannesburg, a report warned of traffic jams because of the presence of “a certain Mr and Mrs Windsor”.

But we’re more modern now: according to one report SA has no fewer than six “legitimate” kingships, topped by Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini. So we should be the last to scoff at the British royals. We have so many kings we’re able to let one of them languish in jail, nogal: AbaThembu King Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo, jailed for 12 years for assault.

It says a lot about SA that we should be chosen to host this royal escapade, and we look forward to the royal couple breaching protocol with abandon on our shores. And if the visit does something for tourism, and lifts our global profile, all the better. But mostly, if it cheers us up and helps rescue us from the spiral of dispiriting news, who can gripe?