It was the non-racial, non-violent, non-Marxist tradition that looked to the Commonwealth which was ultimately successful in resisting the apartheid regime. Which, as tonight's episode of The Queen will correctly depict, the Head of the Commonwealth wanted to subject to sanctions.
Helen Suzman rightly ended up with the DBE, and I am not sure why she never used it, since South Africa was certainly in the Commonwealth when she was born, just as what is now the Irish Republic was in the Commonwealth when Sir Terry Wogan was born.
Those in that tradition at least arguably suffered more than those comfortably, if no doubt painfully, exiled in London, or Moscow, or wherever.
God Save The Queen.
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You really don't understand Twitter, do you?
ReplyDeleteThat's not what I'm told...
ReplyDeleteI can't imagine you're on it. You don't do trivia.
ReplyDeleteNo. I don't.
ReplyDeleteBut yes. I am. Usual address.
Restore the monarchy in South Africa.
ReplyDeleteIt should happen in Zimbabwe first, as a definitive break both with Smith (who purportedly deposed the Queen) and with what came afterwards, leading to a similar break both with apartheid and with the disastrous Stalinist years in South Africa.
ReplyDeleteAllegiance to a monarchy is to an institution embodied by a person, rather than to an ethnicity or an ideology. We all know about states defined ethnically or ideologically. And a monarchy (like, for example, hereditary peerage) expresses the reality of sheer good fortune, of Divine Providence conferring on the more fortunate responsibilities towards the less fortunate. All in all, it is no wonder that the abolition of trade union barons was followed by the abolition of hereditary barons, and no wonder that the BNP wants to abolish the monarchy.
I don't necessarily blame the Afrikaners for having no affection for the British even now, never mind in 1960. I have stood in the Boer POW cemetery in Saint Helena and seen the graves of those boys of 14 and 15, their headstones inscribed in their captors' language rather than in their own. They really did have grievances that certain other, at least equally noisy Britain-haters did not and do not. But even so.
The Republic of South Africa's application for Commonwealth membership was blocked by Canada's John G Diefenbaker, the morally and socially conservative rural populist who opposed official bilingualism in the English-speaking provinces, who campaigned to save the Canadian Red Ensign with the Union Flag in the corner and thus making Canada a nation under the Cross, and who refused to have American nuclear weapons in Canada.
And that Republic was brought about by lowering the voting age (to take advantage of the higher Afrikaner birthrate). When that happened in Britain, it brought to power what those voting for them thought were the Selsdon Tories. In South Africa, it had removed the constitutional ties to the other Commonwealth Realms and to the tradition in which the Crown guarantees the liberties of all the monarch's subjects. Learn the lesson well.