The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (102 page)

BOOK: The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
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Macmillan had been the guiding force behind these changes. He had always judged the empire in empirical rather than emotional terms, asking what economic or strategic value colonies possessed for Britain.
20
It was as a pragmatist that he made his celebrated tour of sub-Saharan Africa at the beginning of 1960. He was rowed ashore at Accra like Sanders of the River, and in Nigeria he found a successor to that fictional district officer in the sagacious figure of Sir James Robertson, the colony’s governor-general. Robertson told Macmillan that, while Nigerians might need twenty-five years in which to prepare themselves for self-government, it was wiser to let them have it immediately. Delay would turn those intelligent men who were now being trained for leadership into rebels and ‘violence, bitterness and hatred’ would follow. The choice was between instant Uhuru and twenty years of repression.
21

In South Africa, it was Macmillan’s turn to deliver a homily, designed to be heeded by whites throughout the continent. It was delivered to the South African parliament in Cape Town and opened with a history lesson: ‘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.’ This process was now underway throughout Africa, and, during his passage through the continent, Macmillan had been struck by its inexorability:

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 is a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.

The South African MPs politely applauded, but it took thirty years for the import of Macmillan’s words to sink in.

For white settlers in Britain’s African colonies Macmillan and Macleod were a pair of Judases whose words and actions added up to a form of treason. ‘We’ve been thoroughly betrayed by a lousy British government,’ complained one Kenyan farmer in 1962. ‘We’ll throw in our allegiance with somebody who’s not always prepared to pull the bloody flag down.’ He had first come to the country in 1938, secured a 999-year lease on his crown land farm, and had been officially encouraged to see himself as part-squire part-schoolmaster when dealing with the blacks: ‘I’m not a missionary, I hate the sight of the bastards. But I came here to farm, and look after these fellows. They look up to you as their mother and father; they come to you with their trials and tribulations.’
22
Now, Kenya’s future prime minister and president, Kenyatta, was saying that any white Kenyan who still wanted ‘to be called “Bwana” should pack up and go’. This form of address, and the deference it implied, mattered greatly to some; Kenya’s white population fell from 60,000 in 1959 to 41,000 in 1965.

Sir Michael Blundell, the leader of Kenya’s moderate whites, explained this exodus in terms of psychology. Post-1945 immigrants were, he thought: ‘the kind that couldn’t adapt to a Labour government. And if they couldn’t adapt to a Labour government, how the hell could they hope to adapt to Africa?’
23
If egalitarian Britain became unbearable, the middle and upper-middle classes could take refuge in Africa where the old values still obtained and servants were freely available. The Duke of Montrose found Southern Rhodesia a welcome change from a Britain which he believed to be afflicted with a terminal moral cancer, whose symptoms he outlined in a memorable speech to the House of Lords in March 1961. There was, he asserted: ‘A great sickness in England … Immorality is made to appear innocent: literature which our fathers banned [
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
] we set free for people to read … the trouble is not only in Africa; the trouble is here too…’ To escape infection, the Duke was prepared to rough it in the bush: ‘I never thought, as a boy, that I should see my father helping to wash up dishes, but I did before he died. He did not complain, and neither shall I complain if I have to do the same in Africa.’

These ramblings formed part of a concerted attack on Macmillan’s new African policy which was led by another feudal dinosaur at war with evolution, the Marquess of Salisbury. He blamed Macleod: ‘He has been too clever by half. He has adapted, especially in his relationship to the white communities of Africa, a most unhappy and wrong approach.’ The result was that the whites, by implication a none-too-clever group, believed they had been replaced by black politicians as Britain’s partners in Africa.
24
Ninety Conservative MPs shared the Marquess’s misgivings and signed a motion of protest against what Macleod was doing. The dissidents included most of the right wing of the party, including Captain Waterhouse (who was chairman of Tanganyika concessions) and, interestingly, a scattering of Ulster Unionists. The latter, presumably, found it easy to identify with white settlers south of the Zambesi.

The revolt over African policy was a damp squib which spluttered harmlessly. The cause of the white minorities did not stir up the same passion in Britain as it did in France, and to have split the Tory party over a minor imperial issue would have been suicidal folly. Nonetheless, Macleod’s liberalism may have helped lose him the chance of gaining the party leadership after Macmillan’s resignation in October 1963. An indirect but grateful beneficiary was Harold Wilson, who had rated Macleod the man most to be feared in the upper ranks of the Conservatives.

The evidence heard by the Monckton Commission sealed the fate of the Central African Federation. It was universally detested by blacks throughout Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia and was, therefore, unenforceable. Its obsequies were conducted by Macleod’s successor, R.A. Butler, at a conference at the Victoria Falls in the summer of 1963. Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland proceeded on separate paths to independence, while Southern Rhodesia sulkily prepared to go it alone. A new party, the Rhodesia Front, made the running on a white supremacy ticket.

Between 1963 and 1980 successive British governments were tormented by the Rhodesian ulcer. It was a source of international embarrassment, the cause of interminable rows inside the Commonwealth, and a distraction from more pressing domestic and European matters. It was the last and least welcome legacy of empire and, as the Commonwealth and United Nations made repeatedly clear, it could only be cured by Britain.

With the disintegration of the Central African Federation, the Rhodesian whites were overwhelmed by a feeling that Britain had deserted them, and that henceforward they would have to shape their own destiny. This was independence under the 1961 Constitution which perpetuated white paramountcy. As Ian Smith, the Rhodesian Front leader, was fond of saying, there would be no black majority rule in his or his childrens’ lifetimes. He was forty-five when he became prime minister in 1964. Smith was an unlikely man to take on the empire, for he saw himself and his countrymen as embodiments of all those old, manly imperial virtues which would have been applauded by G.A. Henty. No scholar (in later life he seemed unable to distinguish between ‘actual’ and ‘factual’), Smith was, like most Rhodesian men, sports mad, excelling in rugger, cricket and tennis. A Hurricane pilot during the war, his political hero was Churchill, a man, he always believed, who would never have abandoned Rhodesia to the blacks. As a negotiator, Smith was stubborn and cunning by starts. As a politician he was plain-spoken and, according to his lights, intensely patriotic. His following among the white community was enormous; in the May 1965 elections his Rhodesia Front won all the fifty seats reserved for whites.

This election provided the popular imprimatur for UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) which was announced on 11 November. It had been preceded by desperate last-minute negotiations between Smith and Harold Wilson, who had flown to Salisbury. The British Prime Minister insisted, as did his successors, that the British parliament alone had the legal right to grant Rhodesia its independence, and then only when blacks as well as whites had the vote. The talks broke down and Wilson returned after what had been a highly disagreeable mission. During a dinner he had to endure the oafish clowning of the Duke of Montrose who told blue jokes and performed a belly dance.
25
Sadly, this aristocrat appears to have succumbed to the creeping degeneracy he had denounced in the Lords four years ago.

On his homecoming, Wilson publicly announced that in the event of UDI Britain would not employ force to bring Rhodesia back to its obedience. It was an immensely controversial statement which gave heart to Smith who, with good reason, was worried that his own army and air force would shrink from fighting the British. Wilson was unaware of his anxieties; what he did know was that the Rhodesian forces were well-equipped and trained, and that Britain’s service chiefs were nervous about engaging them with extended lines of communication. Moreover, it would take time to establish a secure base in Zambia. Even if logistical problems were overcome, there was no popular enthusiasm for the war, although the Archbishop of Canterbury and Jo Grimond, the Liberal leader, were making loud belligerent noises. Opinion polls suggested that they were out of touch with public opinion, which was against a Rhodesian war. This was comforting for Wilson, who was not a warrior by nature and feared that precipitate action might lead to a second Suez, or worse, a British Viet Nam. Rhodesia, he announced, would be overcome by economic sanctions.

Britain lost the war of attrition against Rhodesia. The rebel state flourished and confidence soared. Between 1967 and 1973, 39,000 immigrants arrived to share its prosperity. According to the BBC’s local correspondent, ‘most of them … are in Rhodesia for the good life, and there’s no doubt that they are getting it.’
26
Negotiations continued fitfully. Wilson and Smith met twice, first in December 1966 on board the cruiser
Tiger,
and again in October 1968 on board its sister ship
Fearless.
Both meetings ended in deadlock over majority rule. During the first encounter, the naval officers’ feelings had been ‘Good Old Smithy, bloody old Wilson’. They changed their tune after intimate contact with the Rhodesians who revealed themselves ‘rude, racist and even nigger-bashing in their conversations in the mess’.
27

Those Rhodesian qualities which some found repellent, attracted others, especially on the outer right wing of the Conservative party. One such, Harold Soref MP, claimed that: ‘Rhodesia represents Britain in its halcyon days: patriotic, self-reliant, self-supporting, with law and order and a healthy society. Rhodesia is as Britain was at its best.’
28
This other Eden was sometimes known as ‘Basingstoke-in-the-Bush’, a parody of a pre-war middle-class suburb transported across the Equator, complete with its tennis and golf clubs, and populated by aggressively hearty men in shorts, blazers and cravats, who talked of nothing but sport, and women who knew their place. So too did the black man. Soon after UDI, a former recruit to the Rhodesian police told a journalist that he had been taught that the African ‘is muck to be kicked down and kept there’.
29

Inevitably Africans fought back. Black nationalist movements had been banned and their leaders were either under arrest or in exile. The armed struggle began slowly after UDI and only began to gather momentum by 1972. The pattern of the war was familiar: raids and assassinations by guerrillas, called the ‘boys in the bush’, designed to wear down the enemy’s will. There were two main partisan armies: Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) and Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). The guerrillas knew their trade, they were armed with modern Soviet weaponry, including rockets, and were trained in extensive base camps in Zambia and, from 1975 in Mocambique.

The anti-guerrilla war was a corrosive, inconclusive struggle which ate up Rhodesia’s manpower and treasure. By 1979, 47 per cent of Rhodesia’s revenues were consumed by the war effort, and the government was being forced to mobilise more and more black men to fill the gaps in its army. At the same time, its adversaries seemed to be getting stronger; in September 1978 the guerrillas used a Sam 7 heat-seeking missile to shoot down a Viscount airliner on an internal flight, and another was similarly destroyed in February 1979. Rhodesians began to feel that victory was beyond their grasp and voted with their feet. Between 1977 and 1980, 48,000 whites, a fifth of the European community emigrated.

The truth was, as it had been in Kenya and the Portuguese colonies, that the settlers could not sustain their position without the military power of the mother country. Moreover, by the late-1970s the technical gap between the equipment of the Rhodesian forces and their opponents was narrowing. The destruction of the two airliners had been dramatic proof of this. A similar lesson would be learned more painfully by the Soviet Union during the early 1980s, when it embarked on an imperial war of coercion in that former graveyard of British armies, Afghanistan.

By the beginning of 1978, Smith and the Rhodesia Front had to choose between fighting on and possibly losing a war of attrition, or a salvage operation which would involve considerable concessions to the blacks. They decided on the latter and entered into an alliance with three relatively moderate African parties, Bishop Abel Muzorewa’s United African National Council, Ndabaningi Sithole’s African National Council, and Chief Chirau’s Zimbabwe United People’s Organisation. The upshot was the ‘internal settlement’, which created a constitution that increased black representation. In April 1979, Bishop Muzorewa became prime minister of the cumbersomely-named Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. A month later, the Conservatives under Mrs Margaret Thatcher won a general election, raising hopes in Rhodesia that a settlement with Britain was imminent.

The Rhodesian imbroglio was one of many intractable problems bequeathed Mrs Thatcher by her predecessors. She was determined to act decisively and swiftly and, at the same time, demonstrate how fumbling past governments had been. At the Lusaka Commonwealth conference in the summer she insisted that Britain alone would unravel the Rhodesian knot. The answer lay in bringing the country back under a British government, which would supervise an election in which all political parties, including those of Mugabe and Nkomo (who had boycotted the April poll) would compete. The Commonwealth ministers, who had no alternatives, acquiesced. Zimbabwe–Rhodesia, war-weary and still without the international recognition it craved, also agreed.

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