Attlee's Africa

I don’t know why, but I always thought of Helen Suzman as notably older than Nelson Mandela, even though the real age difference was only about a year.

I had expected to write about her as an example of the temporary utility but ultimate insufficiency of Liberalism. But in fact she was rather better and more interesting than that, never siding with the sort of white reformism that advocated things like “non-racial” but nevertheless very high (property or educational) qualifications for voting, proposals that would in practice have replicated the American South in the century between Civil War and Civil Rights.

Suzman became an outspoken critic of the failings of post-Mandela South Africa. (Desmond Tutu had his moments even while Mandela was still in office.) Not least, she deplored the inaction, to say the least, over Zimbabwe.

Both Mbeki (never mind Zuma) and Mugabe are products of the failure of the Attlee Government, under pressure from a tiny but very noisy faction either in Soviet pay or prepared to serve the Soviet cause for free, to do as it really wanted in Africa, namely that which had been done in India: after several decades of developing local, regional and federal government, power would eventually have been handed over to those who had thus been developed.

Instead, as much in South Africa as anywhere else (and Dominion status in the Forties was not what being a Commonwealth Realm is today – Britain was still effectively in charge, as the Dominions’ role in the War more than demonstrated), power was handed over prematurely to anti-British local cadres, of which the National Party, which went on to avenge the Boers by abolishing the monarchy and leaving the Commonwealth, was one.

Or else it was simply seized by them, as in Rhodesia: you don’t get much more anti-British than declaring UDI and very soon thereafter declaring a republic backed up by the Boer revenge one. Like their South African supporters (probably, as Anglo-Africans themselves, even better), the Rhodesian Front understood that, whatever might go or have gone on in practice, nevertheless the principles embodied by the Crown were ultimately incompatible with their own position.

The Zimbabwean people recently voted for a party known perfectly well to be funded from Britain. They have therefore voted explicitly for closer ties to Britain. Morgan Tsvangari and others should begin by declaring their allegiance and that of their supporters to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of Zimbabwe and of her other Realms and Territories, and appealing to the governments and peoples of all those Realms and Territories to come to their aid.