The Penguin Book of Modern Speeches by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780141909165
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-04-02T20:00:00+00:00

Harold Macmillan

Cape Town, 3 February 1960

‘The wind of change’

Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) had been British prime minister for three years when in January 1960 he left for a tour of Africa that took him through Ghana, Nigeria, Rhodesia, and Nyasaland and then to the apartheid state of South Africa, where he made the most famous speech of his life.

The speech to both houses of parliament was the most important event of the tour. ‘I approached this ordeal with much trepidation,’ Macmillan wrote in his memoirs. ‘I knew that much of what I would be constrained to say would be disagreeable to many of my hearers.’ Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, the South African prime minister [and also one of the prime movers of apartheid], had seen the outlines of the text and what Macmillan was to say had come as a shock.

Standing in the chamber of the Old Cape Colony parliament, Macmillan, who had encouraged independence in Britain’s former colonies, delivered a fifty-minute speech in which he made plain Britain’s deep distaste for the racial policies of his hosts, who were still then members of the British Commonwealth.

Ever since the break-up of the Roman Empire one of the constant facts of political life in Europe has been the emergence of independent nations. They have come into existence over the centuries in different forms, with different kinds of Government, but all have been inspired by a deep, keen feeling of nationalism, which has grown as the nations have grown.

In the twentieth century, and especially since the end of the war, the processes which gave birth to the nation states of Europe have been repeated all over the world. We have seen the awakening of national consciousness in peoples who have for centuries lived in dependence upon some other power. Fifteen years ago this movement spread through Asia. Many countries there of different races and civilizations pressed their claim to an independent national life. Today the same thing is happening in Africa, and the most striking of all the impressions I have formed is of the strength of this African national consciousness. In different places it takes different forms, but it is happening everywhere. The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.

Of course, you understand this better than anyone. You are sprung from Europe, the home of nationalism, and here in Africa you have yourselves created a new nation. Indeed, in the history of our times yours will be recorded as the first of the African nationalisms, and this tide of national consciousness which is now rising in Africa is a fact for which you and we and the other nations of the Western World are ultimately responsible. For its causes are to be found in the achievements of Western civilization, in the pushing forward of the frontiers of knowledge, in

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