Abstract
Harold Macmillan’s address to both Houses of Parliament of the Union of South Africa in Cape Town, 3 February 1960, in which he invoked the idea of a ‘wind of change’ blowing through Africa, is one of the most iconic speeches in the history of the British empire. It came at the end of a landmark six-week tour of the continent, encompassing much of ‘British Africa’. In January 1960 this still included large areas of west Africa, much of east Africa, and the Central African Federation (of Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland). To their south lay the three ‘High Commission Territories’, the protectorates of Basutoland, Bechuanaland, and Swaziland. Touching down in Ghana, since 1957 an independent member of the Commonwealth and the only full British colony yet to have achieved independence in sub-Saharan Africa, Macmillan travelled on to Nigeria, and from there to central Africa, before arriving at his final stop, South Africa. The tour was a counterpart to a six-week tour of the Commonwealth Macmillan had undertaken almost exactly two years earlier. Both were unprecedented, and today it seems inconceivable that a British prime minister should absent himself or herself from the country for such an extended period.
In the twentieth century and especially since the end of the war, the processes which gave birth to the nation states of Europe have been repeated all over the world. We have seen the awakening of national consciousness in peoples who have for centuries lived in dependence upon some other power. Fifteen years ago this movement spread through Asia.Many countries there of different races and civilisations pressed their claim to an independent national life. Today the same thing is happening in Africa and the most striking of all the impressions I have formed since I left London a month ago is of the strength of this African national consciousness. In different places it takes different forms but it is happening everywhere. 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 as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The full text of the speech can be found in Harold Macmillan, Pointing the Way 1959–1961 (London: 1972), pp. 473–82 (Appendix One). For a sound recording of Macmillan’s speech, together with Verwoerd’s response, go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/archve/apartheid/7203.shtml.
Macmillan to Sir John Maud, UK High Commissioner in South Africa (who had principal responsibility for preparing the speech), cited in R. Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire. The Road to Decolonisation 1918–1968 (Cambridge: 2006), p. 258.
E.g. Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire, p. 242; S.R. Ashton, ‘Keeping Change within Bounds: A Whitehall Reassessment’, in M. Lynn (ed.), The British Empire in the 1950s Retreat or Revival? (Basingstoke: 2006), pp. 32–52, esp. p. 45.
Harold Macmillan, Winds of Change, 1914–1939 (London: 1966).
In, e.g., J.G. Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation. The Retreat from Empire in the Post- WarWorld (Basingstoke: 1988);
L.J. Butler, Britain and Empire. Adjusting to a Post-Imperial World (London: 2002);
Martin Shipway, Decolonization and its Impact. A Comparative Approach to the End of Empires (Oxford: 2008).
Speech by Sir Alec Douglas-Home, 11 Feb. 1964, reproduced in R. Hyam and Wm Roger Louis (eds.), The Conservative Government and the End of Empire, 1957–1964 (British Documents on the End of Empire, series A, vol. 4, London: 2000), Part 2, no 389, pp. 268–73.
Peter Catterall, The Macmillan Diaries. Volume I: 1950–57 and Volume II: 1957–66 (London: 2003, 2011).
Anthony Sampson, Macmillan. A Study in Ambiguity (London: 1967; Alistair Horne, Macmillan (2 volumes, London: 1989); CharlesWilliams, Harold Macmillan (London: 2009); D.R. Thorpe, SuperMac. The Life of Harold Macmillan (London: 2010). See also Simon Ball, The Guardsmen. Harold Macmillan, Three Friends, and the World They Made (London: 2004).
S.J. Ball, ‘Harold Macmillan, the Second World War and the Empire’, in R. Aldous and S. Lee (eds.), Harold Macmillan. Aspects of a Political Life (London: 1999), pp. 162–76.
W. David McIntyre, British Decolonization, 1946–1997 (Basingstoke: 1998); M. Lynn (ed.), The British Empire in the 1950s.
On the CAF, see: Philip Murphy, Central Africa (British Documents on the End of Empire, series B, vol. 9, London: 2005), Part I, Introduction.
David Goldsworthy, ‘Keeping Change within Bounds: Aspects of Colonial Policy during the Churchill and Eden Governments, 1951–1957’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 18 (1990), pp. 81–108.
See discussion in Simon Smith (ed.), Reassessing Suez 1956. New Perspectives on the Crisis and its Aftermath (Ashgate: 2008), ‘Introduction’, p. 9.
Philip Murphy, Alan Lennox-Boyd. A Biography (London: 1999), pp. 236–7, 247–50.
See Robert Shepherd, Iain Macleod. A Biography (London: 1994), pp. 161–2.
D. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged. Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London: 2005); C. Elkins, Britain’s Gulag. The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London: 2005). On the court case, see ‘Mau Mau Judgement’, contributions by Stephen Howe, David Anderson, Huw Bennett, and Caroline Elkins in Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 39, 5 (2011), pp. 695–748.
See, e.g., the Anglican Church’s role in recording instances of abuse in the early 1950s, S.E. Stockwell, ‘“Splendidly Leading the Way?” Archbishop Fisher and Decolonisation in British Colonial Africa’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 36, 3 (2008), pp. 199–218.
See also Kenneth Morgan, ‘Imperialists at Bay: the British Labour Party and Decolonisation’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 27 (1999), pp. 233–54.
Dan Horowitz, ‘Attitudes of British Conservatives towards decolonisation in Africa’, African Affairs, 69, 274 (1970), pp. 9–26.
S.J. Ball, ‘Banquo’s Ghost: Lord Salisbury, Harold Macmillan and the High Politics of Decolonisation, 1957–1963’, Twentieth Century British History, 16 (2005), pp. 74–102; Philip Murphy, Party Politics and Decolonisation. The Conservative Party and British Colonial Policy in Tropical Africa, 1951–1964 (Oxford: 1995).
Bill Schwarz, Memories of Empire. Volume 1, TheWhite Man’sWorld (Oxford: 2011), p. 548, note 163.
As surveyed in N.J. White, ‘The Business and the Politics of Decolonization: the British Experience in the Twentieth Century’, Economic History Review, 53, 3 (2000), pp. 544–64.
L.J. Butler, ‘Business and British Decolonisation: Sir Ronald Prain, the Mining Industry and the Central African Federation’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 35, 3 (2007), pp. 459–84.
Catherine Schenk, The Decline of Sterling. Managing the Retreat of an International Currency, 1945–1992 (Cambridge: 2010), pp. 31, 94.
G. Krozewski, Money and the End of Empire. British International Economic Policy and the Colonies, 1947–1958 (Cambridge: 2001).
L.J. Butler, ‘The Central African Federation and Britain’s Post-War Nuclear Programme: Reconsidering the Connections’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 36, 3 (2008), pp. 165–81.
Sarah Stockwell, ‘Trade, Empire and the Fiscal Context of Imperial Business During Decolonization’, Economic History Review, 57, 1 (2004), pp. 142–60. The arrangements survived until 1965.
See, especially, Frederick Cooper’s recent scholarship, including, ‘Alternatives to Nationalism in French Africa, 1945–60’, in Jost Dülffer and Marc Frey (eds.), Elites and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: 2011), pp. 110–37; and Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya. Counterinsurgency, Civil War and Decolonisation (Cambridge and New York: 2009).
Catterall, The Macmillan Diaries, Volume II, 10 Jan. 1962, p. 442.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Sarah Stockwell and L.J. Butler
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Stockwell, S., Butler, L.J. (2013). Introduction. In: Butler, L.J., Stockwell, S. (eds) The Wind of Change. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318008_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318008_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-34826-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-31800-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)