Empires of the Mind

by Robert Gildea

  From the point of view of empire, it suited British capitalism that South Africa imposed security at home and provided a welcoming environment for trade and investment. The more liberal prime ministership of John Vorster after the assassination of Verwoerd in 1966 made it an ideal place for multinational companies such as Citibank, Barclays, General Motors and Ford to invest. Gold production increased in response to rising gold prices in 1971–80 and coal production trebled in 1970–85. Investments increased after 1963 and reached a peak in 1976.27 Harry Oppenheimer, the Oxford-educated chairman of the Anglo-American Corporation and chair of De Beers Consolidated Mines, was in many ways the heir of Cecil Rhodes. He controlled the gold mines and developed into chemicals, explosives, textiles, plastics, steel and newspapers. Anglo-American investments extended throughout Africa and income dwarfed that of many emerging African states. He was on the board of the UK-South African Trade Association (UKSATA), founded in 1966, which acted as a powerful lobby for South African trade and investment.28 The anti-apartheid movement developed globally and campaigned for international sanctions to be imposed on South Africa, but these did not bite until the later 1970s, and there were always many loopholes.29 Besides, the South African government responded to arms sanctions by building up its own arms industry through the Armaments Development Production Company (Armscor), set up in 1968, the better to respond to African nationalism within and outside its own borders.30

  The settler problem for Britain was not over. It posed an enormous challenge in the Central African Federation. Desperate to avoid its own Algerian War, Britain embraced the policy of moving towards black majority rule and the construction of a black majority Commonwealth. It negotiated a new constitution for Nyasaland, which paved the way to an electoral victory for Banda’s Malawi Congress Party in August 1961. Northern Rhodesia was under pressure to go the same way but Roy Welensky, president of the Federation, resisted in the name of a Britannic nationalism that Britain was in danger of betraying. He made frequent visits to London and cultivated allies in the Conservative Monday Club. He told the Institute of Directors that ‘the Federation is the direct descendant of British imperialism’ and quoted an 1892 speech by Cecil Rhodes which warned even then that ‘there is a party of “scuttle” in England whose idea is to retire from every portion of the globe’.31

  The white settlers of the Rhodesias were Britain’s pieds noirs, but they were not able to exercise the same influence over the metropolis as their French opposite numbers. One factor was public opinion. ‘What do I care about the fucking settlers?’ exclaimed one Tory MP in private, ‘Let them bloody well look after themselves!’32 A second was the fact that Macmillan was not prepared to send in military forces or alienate the United Nations or Commonwealth. ‘In Algeria the French have a million men under arms’, he told Welensky in March 1962, ‘and they have now suffered a humiliating defeat. It is too simple a view of history to think that you can exercise control simply by the use of power.’33 Northern Rhodesia went the same way after a constitution was agreed and elections took place in October 1962. The Central African Federation was wound up on 31 December 1963; Nyasaland became Malawi and Northern Rhodesia became Zambia.

  The last stand of white minority rule was in Southern Rhodesia. It had a distinct profile – self-governing since 1923, wealthy and with its own armed forces which had come to the aid of Britain in the Second World War. Only foreign policy was controlled by London but a governor of the Crown was resident in Salisbury. The United Nations had put South Rhodesia under pressure to concede majority rule and the British government tried to force a new constitution that provided for this in July 1961. The African opposition was stifled, its main party banned on three occasions in 1959, 1961 and 1962. The 1962 elections were won by the Rhodesian Front, representing hard-line settlers – farmers and artisans – under Ian Smith, whose family had emigrated from Scotland and who had served in the RAF during the war. He was keen to invoke Churchill to legitimate his view of the British Empire, arguing that ‘he had not fought in Churchill’s war, and Churchill had not had that war, to promote black majority rule of any kind of black mischief’.34 He enjoyed considerable support among his ‘kith and kin’ in Great Britain, and the Monday Club hosted a London reception for him in 1964.

  Ian Smith’s Rhodesia Front was adamant that it would not accept independence on the basis of African majority rule. That was the sticking point. The coming to power of a Labour government in October 1964 made little difference to Britain’s approach. Rhodesia was frozen out of Commonwealth meetings of heads of state and when Smith came to London for Winston Churchill’s funeral on 30 January 1965 he was shown into Downing Street for talks with Harold Wilson through a side door. To break the deadlock, Smith and the Rhodesian government unilaterally declared independence (UDI) on the basis of a white majority constitution on Armistice Day, 11 November 1965. This was the last stand of the settlers, British-style. Unlike in the French scenario of 1962, there was no British involvement to support them. Neither did they send forces to bring the settlers to heel. A blockade was as far as they would go. Wilson was aware of the sympathy Smith enjoyed in some British circles. He was also aware of the strength of the Rhodesian Security Forces, which had seen action in Egypt, Burma and Malaya. Above all, he had no desire to repeat the mistakes of Suez, as Daily Mirror chairman Cecil King noted in his diary.35 Wilson in fact let the cat out of the bag on 30 October 1964, twelve days before UDI, when he broadcast to the nation: ‘If there are those in this country who are thinking in terms of a thunderbolt hurtling through the sky and destroying the enemy, a thunderbolt in the shape of the Royal Air Force, let me say that this thunderbolt will not be coming.’36

  Having declared independence unilaterally, Smith’s regime was thrown to the wolves. It was left to fight the rising tide of African nationalism on its own. Zimbabwean opposition movements formed guerrilla units outside the country and appealed to communist regimes in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and China for help. The first attacks across the border into Rhodesia in the so-called Bush War came in March and July 1968. The Rhodesian Security Forces, African soldiers and NCOs officered by whites, were joined by French Foreign Legion forces and American and Australian Vietnam veterans fighting as mercenaries. Rhodesia also appealed for military support to South Africa, the United States and the Portuguese, who were fighting liberation movements in Angola and Mozambique. A dramatic reversal took place in 1974, when the Portuguese dictatorship was overthrown and wars of liberation reached a new intensity in Angola and Mozambique, with additional support from revolutionary Cuba. The Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) under Robert Mugabe, based in Mozambique, was supported by the Chinese Communists, while the Zimbawe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) under Joshua Nkomo, based in Zambia, was backed by the Soviets.37 About 48,000 white Rhodesians, repeatedly under attack, left the country between 1976 and 1980. Ian Smith, remaining at his post, saw himself as fighting a war that the British were now too decadent to assume. For him the Empire continued at its outposts, even if the metropolis was prepared to abandon them. ‘If Churchill were alive today’, he declared in September 1976, ‘I believe he’d probably emigrate to Rhodesia, because I believe that all those admirable characteristics of the British we believed in, loved and preached to our children, no longer exist in Britain.’38

  Britain’s Settler Colony: Northern Ireland

  Britain may have been prepared to abandon its settlers to the forces of black nationalism in Africa. In Northern Ireland, however, it was a different matter. Ireland, even before India, had been partitioned, and Northern Ireland was given self-government within the Union under the 1921 Government of Ireland Act. The Protestant minority, many of whom were of Scottish origin, supported union with Great Britain and upheld a very Britannic nationalism, were challenged by a majority of Catholic nationalists who demanded a united Ireland. ‘The hatred between colonized and colonizers’, wrote young Catholic activist and politician Bernadette Devlin, �
�was underlined by the difference in their religions, and the Irish were persecuted not only for being natives but on the basis of being Catholics as well.’39 The Protestants maintained their power in town councils by a property franchise and gerrymandering. This ascendancy was defended by security forces comprising the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), which was 88 per cent Protestant in 1961, and the part-time Ulster Special Constabulary or B Specials, who were exclusively Protestant. These official police forces were supplemented by and often perceived to be in league with irregular Unionist terrorists of the Ulster Volunteer Force, founded in 1965, who murdered Catholic troublemakers.40

  This hegemony was challenged by the Catholic and nationalist community which set up a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, inspired by the American model, in 1967. A first march was organised from Coalisland to Dungannon on 24 August 1968 and another in Derry on 5 October 1968, which was brutally broken up by police. The initiative now shifted to People’s Democracy, formed by Queen’s University Belfast students, which organised a march from Belfast to Derry in January 1969, imitating the Civil Rights march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. It was violently stopped at Burntollet Bridge by Unionist thugs and B Specials under former British officer ‘Major’ Ronald Bunting.

  Catholic discontent grew and riots broke out in Belfast in August 1969. Claiming that a sniper was firing from the Divis Flats at the bottom of the Catholic Falls Road the RUC Army fired a machine gun from an armoured car, killing nine-year-old Patrick Rooney. The Queen’s Regiment of the British Army, formed in 1966 from battalions that had seen action in Burma, Kenya and Aden, was now deployed to enforce a peace line between the Falls and Protestant Shankill Road. Tariq Ali of the International Marxist Group (IMG) was quick to see the colonial parallel: ‘British troops are seen once again in action, this time not killing wogs in Aden but brutalizing Catholics in Ulster.’ ‘Ireland’, he concluded, ‘could thus turn out to be the Achilles heel of European capitalism, a Cuba in Europe’.41

  The Catholic community in Belfast clashed with the British Army early in 1971 and riots broke out, while attacks by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) increased. The British government prorogued the Stormont parliament and introduced internment camps for suspected IRA members. On 30 January 1972, which became known as Bloody Sunday, British forces opened fire on Catholic demonstrators in Derry, killing thirteen. For Enoch Powell, Ulster Loyalists were on the front line of a war and Unionism was ‘the assertion of British nationality, the claim to be part of the whole British nation’.42 These were British pieds noirs which would not, as in Algeria, be sacrificed to indigenous nationalism.43 On the other hand British rule might be described as neo-colonialist in the sense of a willingness to resort to massacre in defence of a settler minority.

  Neo-Colonialism Again: Falklands and New Caledonia

  By the final third of the twentieth century it seemed clear that empire was finally at an end. The last colonial remnants were being abandoned. Building a new Europe had moved to the centre of the agenda. The Labour government of Harold Wilson determined that British troops would be withdrawn from ‘east of Suez’ – that is, Singapore, Malaya and the Persian Gulf – and on 30 November 1967 the Union flag was lowered in Aden, which now became the People’s Republic of South Yemen.44 The following year Foreign Office Minister Lord Chalfont travelled 8,000 miles to the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, Pacific, to warn the 2,000 islanders that ‘keeping the Falklands British in 1968 meant something very different from what it might have meant in 1900; Britain was no longer a great nineteenth-century imperial power.’45 The message was that the settlers would not be defended in the event of external aggression. A decade later, in December 1979, soon after Margaret Thatcher came to power, a Lancaster House Agreement brought white Rhodesia finally to an end and paved the way to the Republic of Zimbabwe.46

  Similar developments took place in France, where for the first time in the Fifth Republic, a socialist president, François Mitterrand, and a socialist government were elected in 1981. ‘Let us apply the same rule to everyone’, declared Mitterrand on a visit to Mexico in October 1981, after paying homage to the heroes of the 1911 Mexican Revolution and affirming ‘the same right to non-interference, the self-determination of peoples, peaceful conflict resolution, a new international order’.47 As minister for cooperation – the new name for the minister for colonies – he appointed Jean-Pierre Cot, son of Pierre Cot, who had been a minister in the 1936 Popular Front government and a fervent partisan of decolonisation in 1945.48 The new minister wanted to make a complete break with the neo-colonial practices of Françafrique. Instead of sending in French force to support local despots, he would respond directly to the demands of the Third World, propagate human rights and democracy, and deliver aid and development.49

  These decolonising agendas, however, came up against two great obstacles: settler campaigns for protection and the importance of the metropole’s economic and strategic interests. The Thatcher and Mitterrand regimes were prepared to use military might to defend both settlers and regional interests respectively in the Atlantic and the Pacific. In addition, particularly in the British case, intervention in the South Atlantic was powerfully driven by a fantasy that Britain still was an imperial power or that, if it was ceasing to be so, it must regain its former glory.

  On 2 April 1982 Argentinian forces landed in the Falkland Islands. A semi-colony of Britain’s for much of the nineteenth century, Argentina was now challenging British influence in the South Pacific. The British government was immediately in trouble for not having foreseen the event, and Foreign Minister Carrington resigned. Pictures of captured British marines lying face down in front of Government House in Port Stanley were published in the British press, and created a sense of national humiliation. Not since the Suez Crisis of 1956 had such a challenge to British power and international prestige been mounted. Not since Suez had Britain been confronted by the terrible decision: to intervene or not intervene. Each could be disastrous. The question of power and prestige was compounded by the question of commitment to the islanders. In 1968, after their demonstrations against Lord Chalfont’s threat to abandon them and following a campaign by Conservative MPs and the popular press, it had been decided that the British would not surrender sovereignty over the islands against the wishes of the islanders. These thus became British pieds noirs, joined to the British people by ties of kinship and Britannic nationalism, an outpost of Greater Britain, holding the government fast to its promise not to let them go.50

  Argentina was a country that switched on a regular basis between democracy and dictatorship, and since 1976 had been a military dictatorship. As in 1956, the analogy was made with the appeasement of dictators, a capitulation that was not going to be repeated after 1938. That is why the Second World War had been fought, and it was a sentiment that stirred much of the British Left as well as the Right. Addressing an emergency session of the House of Commons on 3 April 1982, Margaret Thatcher announced, ‘We have absolutely no doubt about our sovereignty, which has been continuous since 1833. Nor do we have any doubt about the unequivocal wishes of the Falkland islanders, who are British in stock and tradition, and they want to remain British in allegiance.’ Reviving the idea of Britannic nationalism in Churchillian terms, she declared that ‘The people of the Falkland islands, like the people of the United Kingdom, are an island race.’ Michael Foot, leader of the Labour opposition, was a longtime anti-colonial campaigner but had also written a tirade against the appeasers, Guilty Men, in 1940. He urged that ‘foul and brutal aggression’, like that of Hitler and Mussolini, had to be stopped, otherwise ‘there will be a danger not only to the Falkland Islands but to people all over this dangerous planet’.51

  During the two months of the war the press evoked and sustained a nationalism that was wider and deeper than anti-fascism. It created a fantasy of British greatness that briefly overlay a deeper sense of national decline. The Task Force that set sail for the islands was likened to the Arm
ada and played on the myth of British naval supremacy (Figure 4.3). The sinking of the Argentinian battleship Belgrano was famously greeted by The Sun newspaper with the headline Gotcha! The air war was portrayed as a rerun of the Battle of Britain, with the Harrier fighter pilots the new ‘Few’ of 1940, while the landings at San Carlos became a new D-Day landing.52 The home front in the Second World War was evoked in images such as Carl Giles’ Sunday Express cartoon picturing Grandma clearing out the old air-raid shelter. Margaret Thatcher was likened to Kitchener, Nelson or Wellington, her features drawn onto Britannia, portrayed as a warrior-queen leading her people into battle against tyranny.53 Addressing the Conservative Party conference in Brighton to eager applause on 10 October 1982 she declared that ‘the spirit of the South Atlantic was the spirit of Britain at her best. It has been said that we surprised the world, that British patriotism was rediscovered in those spring days. Mr. President, It was never really lost.’54