Apartheid by Another Name
Geoffrey Traugh
Malawi celebrated its independence from Britain on 6 July 1964. The official ceremony was held at Central Stadium in Blantyre, the country’s commercial capital. Among the attending dignitaries was Prince Philip, there on behalf of Queen Elizabeth. Malawi was the fifteenth former British colony to achieve independence since she assumed the throne in 1952, so by the time he came to Blantyre, Philip had some experience with these celebrations. Footage from the day shows him hitting every cue, solemn when he needed to be and laughing with the Malawian prime minister, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, when the moment called for smiles from the stage.
The prince performed the end to empire that British officialdom wanted, where a royal could be seen joking with an African nationalist who been locked away in one of her majesty’s prisons not too long before. It was a transfer of power, not a defeat and certainly not an apology or an admission of guilt. It was a rewriting of history to make the British political class feel as though they had accomplished something in the colonies, whatever the rest of the world was saying about imperialism. A transfer of power also suited new nationalist governments, which needed the business and market access that came with membership of the Commonwealth. Banda had as much reason to be magnanimous as Prince Philip.
With the death of Queen Elizabeth last week, the press has trotted out the old story about the end of the British Empire to celebrate her political legacy. It has gone over poorly outside the British establishment echo chamber, in part because the political expediencies of that earlier era no longer exist. There’s nothing to be gained by staying silent about Mau Mau, for example, or the Nyasaland Emergency, which resulted in the deaths of at least 48 people and put Banda in prison for more than a year, from March 1959 to April 1960.
Some commentators seem baffled by the criticism, asking what Queen Elizabeth did to deserve it: her reign coincided with decolonisation; she didn’t tell the Colonial Office what to do; she, or her husband, presided over events orchestrated by others.
There were moments, though, when she was called on to take a more than ceremonial role. In January 1953, a seven-member delegation of chiefs and nationalist activists from Nyasaland, as Malawi was then known, travelled to Britain to present a petition to the queen opposing the formation of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. The proposed federation would have devolved sovereignty to a white-minority government, with token representation and constitutional protections for African interests. Proponents – the Conservative government in Britain, white settlers in Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland – described federation as a ‘partnership’ of white and black, the British empire’s answer to apartheid South Africa. Opponents – Africans in Nyasaland and the Rhodesias, the Labour left and many British churches – called it apartheid by another name. By 1953, federation seemed like a done deal. The Nyasaland delegation’s petition was a last-ditch legal manoeuvre to scuttle the final talks on the proposed federal constitution in London, scheduled for the same time as their visit.
The petition laid out the case against federation: under the terms of the treaties signed by chiefs in the 1890s, during the ‘scramble for Africa’, the British government had no right to transfer Nyasaland’s sovereignty to another power (i.e. the future federal government). It needed the consent of the chiefs, as well as the African population generally. It was an ambitious test of international law: who decided when and how a people may exercise their right to self-determination? The Nyasaland activists appealed to Queen Elizabeth personally because the Conservative government wouldn’t listen. They also thought – one traditional ruler to another – she’d understand their position.
When the Nyasaland delegation arrived in January, they hadn’t set a date with the queen. Supporters in Britain arranged a speaking tour for the chiefs. Banda, then a doctor with a practice in suburban London, joined them. Friends in the Labour Party lobbied for them to receive an audience at the palace. Oliver Lyttelton, the Conservative colonial secretary, was dead set against a meeting, as was the colonial government in Nyasaland, which had tried everything short of arrests to prevent the chiefs from leaving. Officials did not want the new queen to be compromised by the issue. If she felt differently, she didn’t say so publicly.
The Nyasaland delegation’s tour was a success – they spoke to large crowds and grabbed a few headlines, with the only sour note coming at Cambridge University, where a student club lit firecrackers and banged on pianos to disrupt the event. But the chiefs never had their audience with the queen. They had to settle for Lyttelton, who received them with ‘undisguised incivility’, as Banda wrote in his unpublished prison memoir.
The chiefs made the journey home to Nyasaland in early February, disappointed not to have seen the queen but buoyed by the support they had received in Britain. As the Conservative government shepherded the federal scheme through votes in Parliament and a virtually whites-only referendum in Southern Rhodesia, the Nyasaland Supreme Council answered with a non-co-operation campaign. Activists called for a boycott of celebrations for the coronation in June. Local colonists took offence – the queen’s coronation was no time for politics, like her funeral seventy years later. But the boycott held, and the colonial government had to scramble to fly out a minor chief at the eleventh hour to represent Nyasaland at the coronation in London. It took the government until September to break the campaign. By then, eleven protesters had been killed by colonial security forces.
The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland lasted a decade. There were times in the 1950s when it looked as if empire might end with a white-ruled federation rather than African nation-states in British Central Africa. Southern Rhodesia’s illegal independence from 1965 to 1980 shows how real the possibility was, to say nothing of apartheid South Africa. After 1953, the anti-federation campaign became an anti-colonial movement for secession and independence. The queen’s name rarely came up as a source of grievance. But activists didn’t think to appeal to her again, either. They took their legal case against federation to the UN, not the Crown.
Maybe the Nyasaland chiefs were wrong to have expected Queen Elizabeth to intervene on their behalf. With nearly seventy years of hindsight it certainly looks that way. But their appeal came less than a year into her time on the throne, before anyone could confidently say what kind of queen she would be. The Nyasaland delegation thought she might represent the empire as they had been taught it was, and which its apologists would have students learn about today: one that listened to its subjects, respected the rule of law and prepared peoples for self-government. But Elizabeth was not that queen, and Britain was never that empire.
Comments
-
21 September 2022
at
5:25pm
Mark Seddon
says:
Very interesting piece. Tribune, the paper I used to edit, gave Banda a platform when no other newspaper would.
-
22 September 2022
at
12:45am
CollinR
says:
@
Mark Seddon
“Far worse than the British in all likelihood” - is this a statement of fact, backed by empirical evidence or an uninformed counterfactual typical of imperial nostalgia? Because many Malawians who lived during Banda’s rule would tell you their social and economic conditions have gotten worse since the transfer to ‘democracy’, even while they recognize Banda for the autocrat that he was.
-
21 September 2022
at
5:48pm
Graucho
says:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Om_quFH_JbU
-
22 September 2022
at
12:25pm
Duncan Money
says:
This is a nice article, though it was not only the Conservative government who were proponents of Federation. The Federation had first been proposed by the previous Labour government and only a couple of week's before the second Atlee government was dissolved a Cabinet paper was circulated arguing that Federation was "in the best interests of Africans."
-
23 September 2022
at
8:10am
Tim Timson
says:
@
Duncan Money
It's estimated in Banda's regime, at least 6,000 were murdered - up to 18,000 in certain estimates. I would say its was pretty brutal.
-
22 September 2022
at
2:22pm
Graucho
says:
""far worse than the British" Before questioning this statement, do look at the video link I posted above.
-
27 September 2022
at
1:53pm
Delaide
says:
@
Graucho
I did read it, thank you. When the leader names himself ‘The Conqueror’ you’ve got a problem.
-
24 September 2022
at
10:43pm
o senhor christopher
says:
Interesting how this piece starts with questions about the role of the Queen in political matters, namely the formation of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and ends agreeing that she had no role.
Read moreSadly he turned into a terrible old despot, hanging onto power for 30 years -- which this piece fails to mention. Far worse than the British in all likelihood; there were few settlers there to make the lives of Africans a misery.
The Federation of Rhodesia & Nyasaland was also supported by liberal whites such as Sir Roy Welensky & Garfield Todd, who feared that Southern Rhodesia, left to its own devices would become a hardline, settler state -- which of course it did.
By the time the Federation came about, the British knew that the game was up in Central Africa. And when later Southern Rhodesia declared UDI under Ian Smith, Harold Wilson was urged by Zambia, Malawi etc to intervene militarily. Wilson was afraid that 'kith & kin' arguments in the military could presage a rebellion of army officers and the military were reminded of their Oath of Allegiance to the Sovereign (including my late father). He did set up the Royal Navy Beira Patrol off the Mozambique coast to try and enforce sanctions -- but never along the coast of South Africa.
By the time the last of the Imperial General Staff such as retired General Walter Walker became active over Rhodesia, Smith had declared a Republic..
The Queen sometimes chose to push back against the PM & Foreign Office, most notably over her visit to Ghana, when Nkrumah was toying with leaving the Commonwealth and subsequently sanctions against Apartheid (she backed the Commonwealth against the boneheaded intransigence of Thatcher), but apparently not back then in Nyasaland.
Mark Seddon notes that Banda became a despot. True, but the claim that he was "far worse than the British" cannot be taken seriously. The British authorities massacred Malawians protesting against colonial rule on several occassions , most notoriously at Nkhata Bay in 1959 when at least 28 unarmed demonstrators were shot dead. British colonialism did not require the presence of settlers to make the lives of Africans a misery.
The author says that she was not prepared to listen to her subjects, to respect the rule of law, to prepare her subjects for self government. And indeed, Elizabeth II was NOT involved in any way in politics. African (or any other) chiefs were mistaken to think she was. She stood for the United Kingdom as it was defined by political leaders. She did what she was told, including NOT meeting with African chiefs from Nyasaland. If she had, it would have thrown the British constitutional system into chaos, and the government of the day was not going to allow that.
The baffled commentators are correct to say, as the author seems almost accidentally to have discovered, that she was "not that queen."