This article is dedicated to the memory of Nelson Mandela (1918-2013), below with François Pienaar after the Springboks won the 1995 Rugby World Cup. (See videos at end of article.) Not only did he support and integrate the national sport; he combined Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika and Die Stem van Suid-Afrika as a joint national anthem. His Churchillian magnanimity was a model for his time. And even more for ours.

“Almal sal regkom” 

Continued from Part 1.

In 1994 President Nelson Mandela’s representatives asked me for the text of Churchill’s third speech to Congress. He was to address a Joint Session soon after ending Apartheid (racial segregation). I assumed he wanted the 1952 text because it was delivered (for once) in peacetime. There were no Churchill quotes in Mr. Mandela’s speech. But there was a certain echo—of which more anon.

The article prompting this essay argued that Churchill’s support of South African union helped deprive Africans of their rights. The truth is more complicated. Churchill had his faults, and some stemmed from his stubborn optimism. “Almal sal regkom,” he often remarked in Afrikaans: “All will come right.” Much has since come right in South Africa, and Churchill made his contribution.

Apartheid did not begin when Britain united Natal, Cape Colony, the Transvaal and Orange Free State in 1910. It developed gradually, not taking legal form until 1949. Blacks were not everywhere disenfranchised. As Britain approved the Transvaal constitution in July 1906, Churchill and Colonial Secretary Lord Elgin strove to expand liberties against stubborn resistance.

“No cause for present apprehension”

Elgin and Churchill intended to lay the question of native rights before the cabinet. They faced several challenges. First, “nothing could be done for Africans involving the spending of British taxpayers’ money.” Second, there was the feeling: why rush? There was “no serious friction” between blacks and whites. “Each race goes its own way and lives its own life.” There was nothing like the racial animus in America, Britons told each other.

Elgin, with no experience of African Society didn’t share Churchill’s views on the rights of subjects of all colors. Natives could vote in Cape Colony, Elgin conceded. But that would end “when the whites begin to realise that political power is passing out of their hands.” Elgin thought Native councils should be established “to give them freedom to express their views.” How would those views matter? Elgin never addressed the question. “It is therefore all the more remarkable and impressive,” wrote Ronald Hyam, “that so much time was devoted to it.”

The protectorate issue

In April 1908 Lord Crewe replaced Lord Elgin as Colonial Secretary. Simultaneously, Churchill became President of the Board of Trade. This did not prevent Churchill from continuing to strive for native interests.

Churchill declared that a future South African state must concede “our right to be consulted effectively upon the native policy. I would not do anything for them without a sufficient return for the benefit of the native….” Nor should Britain jump to hand over the protectorates. What were these?

Within South Africa’s multiple components were three British protectorates. Basutoland (today’s Lesotho) and Bechuanaland (now Botswana) were established after the First Boer War (1880-81). Swaziland (renamed Eswatini in 2018) became a protectorate after the Second Boer War (1899-1902). All three, governed by native chiefs, proved a major bone of contention. For almost a century, South Africa would demand their annexation. Britain, including Churchill, found one excuse after another not to agree. Finally, in the heyday of Apartheid, Britain granted all three independence.

“Majestic, beneficent, far-reaching…”

The natives’ best security, Churchill told Crewe, was “our power to delay” handing over the protectorates. A few years would surely make a difference:

…the Government of United South Africa will take a broader and calmer view of native questions…. [And] the real security the natives are gaining in education, civilisation and influence so rapidly that they will be far more capable—apart from force altogether—of maintaining their rights, and making their own bargain…. [W]e should assert our intention to hand over the Protectorates…the more South Africa will swallow the better for House of Commons—and should then play steadily for time with all the cards in our hand. [Let us try] to get as much as we can for the natives…. The horse will draw the cart, if both are tied together. But do not let them get separated. Confront Parliament with a complete scheme, majestic, beneficent, far-reaching. Prove to them that you have done your best for the natives.

The drift toward Apartheid

On 31 May 1910 the Union of South Africa, united Cape Colony, Natal, the Transvaal and Orange Free State. Apartheid was not a word in use then. In the mainly British Cape and Natal, qualified males retained the vote regardless of race. Of course, “qualified” then required minimum income or property ownership. White women received the vote in 1930. By then, as Elgin had predicted, the black franchise in the Cape and Natal had dwindled. Successive governments of the white supremacist National Party (often known as “Nationalists”) chipped away at it, and few blacks or Cape Coloureds were still voting in the 1930s.

Two world wars kept Churchill far from South African affairs. There is no comment in his ‘tween-wars writings on the drift toward segregated societies. South Africa reasserted its claim to the protectorates. Natives should be consulted and their “full acquiescence sought,” answered Edwin Smith in 1938. “Would anyone seriously maintain that the people of this country should keep the one pledge and not the other? A promise given to Africans is just as sacred as a promise given to Afrikaners.”

Botha and Smuts

Churchill’s two best Afrikaner friends were former Boer enemies. Louis Botha (1869-1919), was the country’s first prime minister. Botha succeeded in making South Africa a self-governing Dominion. Prime Minister Jan Christian Smuts (1870-1950) became one of Churchill’s closest confidants.

Smuts was no egalitarian, but in his day he was considered moderate. He believed in the government by whites and “the inherent stability and good faith” of blacks. He resisted “breaking down their local tribal customs,” and opposed “the artificial half-baked white ideas we are foisting upon them.”

Malan and the Apartheid campaign

In 1946 the Fagan Commission on native laws recommended easing restrictions on natives in urban areas. It was self-serving, since it contemplated improving the supply of labor. Still, it was not Apartheid. It would have helped ease the poverty in which blacks were forced to live outside white urban areas. Smuts’s support for this reform outraged the National Party, led by Daniel François Malan, an ardent racialist. Malan fought the May 1948 election on color lines, and for the first time we heard the word Apartheid.

Smuts’s United Party ran in part on racial reconciliation—and lost. It was as surprising as Churchill’s defeat in 1945, and Smuts never got over it. He derided the Nationalists for calling his chosen successor Jan Hofmeyr a “kaffir boetie” and “gogga.” In grief and despair, he died two years later.

Smuts and Churchill

Churchill saw himself in Smuts’s defeat. “A great world statesman [was] cast aside by the country he led through so many perils and for whose independence he fought with such valour in bygone days, and for whose revival he worked with so much perseverance over long years, raising South Africa to a level of repute and influence in the world never known before.”

Malan’s drive for Apartheid depressed Smuts. The Population Registration Act of 1950 formalized identity cards specifying one’s race. The Group Areas Act ended mixed races living side by side, allotting each race its separate areas. The 1951 Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act demolished poor black neighborhoods within white enclaves. White employers had to pay for housing of any black workers allowed to reside in white cities. Laws proscribed mixed marriages. The 1953 Reservation of Separate Amenities Act reserved to whites such public facilities as beaches, buses, hospitals, schools and universities. “Whites only” signs appeared, even on park benches. Apartheid seemed at least as severe as American Jim Crow laws, which Britons once proudly claimed “don’t exist here.”

Smuts saw his country “moving into a dark period of totalitarian politics.” In 1950, Malan’s government disenfranchised Cape Coloured (mixed-race) citizens. Government bureaus ran non-white affairs. Malan, Smuts told Churchill, could not “control his republican extremists. [Their propaganda] will influence racial feeling here as no other issue can.”

Bantustans

Before he left office, Malan made another claim to the protectorates. Churchill was Prime Minister when it arrived in 1954, His response stood foursquare for justice:

There can be no question of Her Majesty’s Government agreeing at the present time to the transfer of Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland to the Union of South Africa. We are pledged, since the South Africa Act of 1909, not to transfer these Territories until their inhabitants have been consulted [and] wished it. [South Africa should] not needlessly press an issue on which we could not fall in with their views without failing in our trust.

Within fourteen years, Britain would grant all three protectorates independence. Today, Botswana is one of the most prosperous and democratic countries in Africa.

In 1958 Malan’s successor Hendrik Verwoerd set up twenty “bantustans” or black homelands, nominally independent, but recognized by no other government. Churchill had thought South Africa’s repudiating the Crown inconceivable. He was wrong.  In 1961 Verwoerd proclaimed a republic, leaving a British Commonwealth increasingly critical of Apartheid.

“The oneness of the human race”

Back to Nelson Mandela’s speech to Congress. He did not quote Churchill. I preferred to think his request for Churchill’s speech meant that he shared the Churchillian spirit. There was an echo when he spoke of “the uneasy road to victory” for human rights…

Principal among these was, on the one hand, the willingness of the erstwhile minority rulers to concede political power without first resorting to such resistance as would reduce our country to a wasteland. On the other was the ability of the oppressed majority to forgive and accept a shared destiny with those who had enslaved them. That both black and white in our country can today say we are to one another brother and sister…constitutes a celebration of the oneness of the human race.

A half century before, Churchill told the House of Commons:

…when the ancient Athenians, on one occasion, overpowered a tribe in the Peloponnesus which had wrought them great injury by base, treacherous means, and when they had the hostile army herded on a beach naked for slaughter, they forgave them and set them free, and they said: “This was not because they were men; it was done because of the nature of Man.”

Ever since he asked for Churchill’s speech, I have regarded Nelson Mandela as a Churchillian. I am sure he would not approve of Churchill’s every act toward South Africa over the years. But I have no doubt that he shared two famous Churchill qualities: “In Victory, Magnanimity. In Peace, Goodwill.”

Reflections

Did everything come right in South Africa? An ex-pat friend says: “Not everything. The heady days of Mandela are long gone.” Corruption, crime and poverty still exist. “The best thing is that post-Apartheid it is not a racialistic country.” It is predominantly a two-party parliamentary system with open elections. The white population retains its economic power, but there are many black entrepreneurs, intellectuals and professionals. They are contributing much to the country.”

Was Churchill everywhere right on South Africa? No, but his efforts deserve consideration. Was his attitude paternalistic? “Of course, and you can quote Abraham Lincoln, and most of America’s founders, in precisely the same sense,” writes Hillsdale College’s President Larry Arnn:

The remarkable thing is that Lincoln, for the slaves, and Churchill, for the Empire, believed that people of all colors should enjoy the same rights, and that it was the mission of their country to protect those rights…. I do not think Churchill was typical of the age on this question, if the age was racist.

Another thing to remember is that Lincoln and Churchill were political men. Also they were democratic men. They needed, and thought it was right that they needed, the votes of a majority. If they lived in an age of prejudice (and every age is that) then of course they would be careful how they offended those prejudices.

Videos

South Africa’s dual national anthems, Rugby World Cup, 1995: Click here.

Springboks’ Captain François Pienaar looks back: Click here.

Part 1: 1902-1909

In “Apartheid: Made in Britain,” Richard Dowden argued that Britain not South Africa cost black South Africans their rights. His account is factual as far as it goes, but there is more to say about Churchill’s effort to achieve justice in South Africa.

By the end of the Second Boer War, Britons were as weary as Americans are today over Afghanistan. Both British political parties fought the 1906 election promising peace in South Africa. From 1906 Churchill, now Under-Secretary for the Colonies, represented colonial affairs in the House of Commons. (His chief, the 9th Earl of Elgin, sat in the Lords.) Churchill declared their hope to build upon “reconciliation and not upon the rivalry of races.” It was tall order.

Churchill and the Africans

Churchill’s views about the rights of British subjects of all colors marked him as a dangerous radical. In 1899, imprisoned in Pretoria, he argued with a Boer jailer who mocked Britain’s racial policies:

Well, is it right that a dirty Kaffir should walk on the pavement—without a pass too? That’s what they do in your British Colonies. Brother! Equal! Ugh! Free! Not a bit. We know how to treat Kaffirs…. Ah, that’s you English all over. No, no, old chappie. We educate ’em with a stick…. Insist on their proper treatment will you! Ah, that’s what we’re going to see about now.

“Probing at random,” wrote Churchill “I had touched a very sensitive nerve.” Boer aversion to British rule was “the abiding fear and hatred of the movement that seeks to place the native on a level with the white man…. The dominant race is to be deprived of their superiority; nor is a tigress robbed of her cubs more furious than is the Boer at this prospect.” He would learn later the depth of that ferocity.

South Africa: spinning top of diversity

In 1907, Churchill made a tour of British East Africa. From the East Africa Protectorate (later Kenya) Churchill wrote the King: “There can be no question of our handing over this beautiful Protectorate upon which we have spent so much, with its 4 or 5 millions of Your Majesty’s native subjects, to the control of the first few thousand white men who happen to arrive in the country.”

Though Churchill respected Boer agronomy and fighting prowess, South Africa posed a knotty problem for any peacemaker. Natives outnumbered Boers and British by five to one. Cape Colony contained significant numbers of “Cape Coloureds” and Jews.  There were also Indians, on whose behalf Mohandas Gandhi was prominent. Years later, Gandhi remembered: “I have got a good recollection of Mr. Churchill when he was in the Colonial Office and somehow or other since then I have held the opinion that I can always rely on his sympathy and goodwill.”

Churchill favored a generous settlement with the Boers. A war-weary public agreed. South Africa was quite different from other British African territory. So many peoples who cordially deplored each other suggests the enormity of Churchill’s task. Yet he was confident of the right tactic. Make the Boers “one of the foundations of our position in South Africa.” Then “we shall be building upon the rock.”

“Equal rights irrespective of colour”

Pro-native, Churchill was on the “radical wing” of the Liberal Party, but even that wing had its prejudices. He favored “party government…upon racial lines. It is so at the Cape.” In the British Cape Colony, qualified blacks voted.

Nothing more united the whites, Churchill declared, than politicizing natives. In the war it was “a nameless crime on either side to set the black man on his fellow foe.” Yet Churchill recognized Britain’s responsibility:

We will endeavour…to advance the principle of equal rights of civilized men irrespective of colour. We will not—at least I will pledge myself—hesitate to speak out when necessary if any plain case of cruelty of exploitation of the native for the sordid profit of the white man can be proved.

Pleasing Gandhi, he promised “a proper status for our Indian fellow subjects.” He demanded “good, well-watered land” for natives to “dwell secluded and at peace.” Examples of the latter were three British protectorates administered by native chiefs, Bechuanaland, Basutoland and Swaziland. Britain resisted periodic attempts by South Africa to annex these territories. In the 1960s they became the independent nations of Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini.

“Terminological inexactitude”

Churchill had also to address the problem of Chinese coolies, indentured workers in the Rand goldmines. The Liberals campaigned in 1906 against what they called “Chinese slavery.” Churchill abjured the term, since they were paid wages, not bought or sold, and free to return home. He famously quipped this could not be called slavery “without some risk of terminological inexactitude.”

Churchill’s contentions on behalf of the Chinese brought him into conflict with leading conservatives like Balfour and Joseph Chamberlain. But the South Africa High Commissioner, Lord Selborne, understood Churchill’s position. The Boers were simply bemused. Boer leader Jan Smuts remarked: “Winston’s pity for the Chinese-flogging [Transvaal Governor] Milner is no less Olympian than that for the benighted radical who thought the Chinese indentures partook of the nature of slavery.”

Ultimately, white and native labor gradually replaced the coolies, and a vexatious problem vanished. The greater challenge was: who would run the Boer colonies in the future?

The Transvaal constitution

Throughout 1906, Churchill pressed for Responsible Government in the Transvaal and Orange Free State. He also denounced Natal courts’ treatment of blacks. Elgin and Churchill hoped Boer territories would allow native governing councils, as in the British protectorates. But both agreed that “harsh laws are sometimes better than no laws at all.” Without Boer collaboration there would be “more injustice and tyranny on the natives.” Elgin believed that forced equality would “prejudice the just expectations of natives.” The right time was when “the two races stand more on an equal footing.”

Churchill insisted that “our responsibility to the native races remains a real one.” The Union of South Africa, he hoped, would finally place “treatment of native races upon a broad and secure platform….”

The Transvaal elected its first parliament in February 1907. Churchill thought a Boer majority  “quite impossible.” He was wrong. The Boer Het Volk Party won a majority of five, and Churchill’s only consolation was that his friend Louis Botha became prime minister. In December, the Orangia Unie (Orange Union) took twenty-nine of thirty-eight seats in the Orange Free State. Black voting was thus proscribed. Yet no one believed this was worth reopening the Boer War.

Pros and cons

Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman congratulated Churchill over the Transvaal constitution: “The finest and noblest work of the British power in recent times.” Randolph Churchill, writing his father’s biography, praised his “urgency and assiduity…the cogency of his arguments, his mastery of the task.”

But Campbell-Bannerman was writing in 1907, Randolph Churchill in 1967. That was then but this is now. In 2014, Christopher Beckvold wrote: “The British Government was partly responsible for Apartheid and…Churchill was just as responsible as a member of the Government. [But] historians do not want to slander a great man.”

Not exactly. Richard Dowden’s “Apartheid: Made in Britain” appeared twenty years before Mr. Beckvold’s thesis.

Let us add up the score. From his first encounter with South Africa in 1899, Churchill stood up for native rights. That was an uncommon thing among Victorian Englishmen. After the Boer War, he publicly and privately emphasized fair play for black Africans. In Parliament he promoted “good, well-watered land” for native cultures. Without Boer cooperation, nothing could be done. Churchill hoped, vainly, that the Boer colonies might merge into a more liberal union. As late as 1954, as we shall see, he denied South Africa the British protectorates. One of them is now among Africa’s most prosperous countries.

“The Art of the Possible”

It is quite true, as Mr. Dowden wrote, that Churchill’s policies in 1906-07 abetted Boer power. That power waxed with the Union of South Africa in 1910 and the election of Louis Botha as its first prime minister. Under later National (aka “Nationalist”) Party governments, the black vote in the Cape and Natal gradually withered. So did Churchill’s hopes for more moderate evolution. But as Bismarck said, “Politics is the art of the possible.”

Mr. Dowden ended his 1994 article with “half a cheer” for Churchill’s chief, Secretary of State for the Colonies Lord Elgin. In 1906, he wrote, Elgin hoped “that Afrikaners would, ‘in some time to come’ see the good sense of granting ‘reasonable representation to the natives.’ I suppose you could say his wish has come true—at last.”

In 1907, Elgin wrote Churchill: “I am not satisfied that a compromise is impossible.” Churchill favored just such an arrangement. “I would not,” he replied, “do anything for them without a sufficient return for the benefit of the native.”

Perhaps we might offer half a cheer for Winston Churchill, too.

Concluded in Part 2: From 1910 to the Age of Mandela.