The Diamond Queen: Elizabeth II and Her People by Marr Andrew

Author:Marr, Andrew [Marr, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780230760943
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2011-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

The Rogue Royalists of Africa

Wilson’s reluctance to engage with Labour republicanism was temperamental, but he also had more urgent issues to confront for which he needed the Queen’s help. None was more dangerous for the Commonwealth or more embarrassing to London than the defiance of the white minority rulers of Rhodesia. With just one sixteenth of the total population, they had been aggressively fending off any move towards black majority rule and were close to breaking with the rest of the Commonwealth. The authority of the Queen was a central part of the dispute because, paradoxically, hardly anyone was more naturally royalist to their bones than a treason-plotting white of Rhodesia. The Rhodesian story is tangled and became truly tragic after Robert Mugabe took over as ruler of the country and turned Africa’s breadbasket into an economic wilderness of thuggery, theft and malnutrition. The Rhodesia/Zimbabwe story throws up hard questions about Britain’s role in Africa, the decolonization project, and the Queen’s own position as Head of the Commonwealth.

In the 1890s, a huge area north of South Africa had been invaded and colonized by British settlers. What is now Zimbabwe and was then called Southern Rhodesia was the richest and most British-dominated part of the northwards push. It became a self-governing colony. To its north was a protectorate, Northern Rhodesia, with far fewer whites but large mineral deposits. Alongside this was a smaller protectorate, Nyasaland, with sparse, mainly Scottish settlement. In 1953 London brokered a deal to join these three into a single Central African Federation, a ‘federal realm of the British Crown’. For ten years this unlikely union, with the Queen’s head on its coinage and postage stamps, and its flag incorporating the Union Jack, survived. It stitched together the self-consciously white-colonial south with territories likely to become black-ruled much more quickly. Arguments about the future of colonial Africa crackled through Whitehall – not about the eventual end of white rule, regarded as inevitable, but about the timescale and conditions. London’s overriding policy was that no former dominion or colony could be granted independence without majority rule. For the CAF the hope had been to find some middle way between the apartheid and white-supremacist South Africa and emerging Marxist black independent states. But the independence movements of what became Malawi and Zambia forced the pace. When they triumphed, the whites of Southern Rhodesia opted to go it alone, and reject any early steps towards majority rule.

They were led by Ian Smith, a pugnacious farmer. During the war he had been an RAF Hurricane and Spitfire pilot and, after being shot down over Italy, had helped Italian partisans fight the Germans. Rugby- and cricket-playing, blond and intensely patriotic, he thought of himself as a ‘Britisher’ and was about as passionate a monarchist as any Home Counties Conservative could imagine. He was a most unlikely rebel and much of Tory Britain, including many newspapers, was cheering for him. Smith was essentially asking for Wilson to accept his word that one day, eventually,

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