On 15 March, 1947, in a special supplement to commemorate the arrival of the British royal family in Natal, South Africa, the isiZulu newspaper, Ilanga lase Natal published a poem by the writer, playwright, and broadcaster, H. I. E. Dhlomo. The man who had proclaimed the emergence of the progressive, forward looking ‘New African’, Dhlomo was also ‘the poet of the (ANC) Youth League’ whose poetry chronicled the disappointed aspirations of the decade of the 1940s. After rhapsodizing the beauties of Natal's landscape which would greet the royal visitors, the poet asks:
The mood of the poem again shifts, and Dhlomo proclaims:
And finally, ending on a religious note, Dhlomo delivers a direct message to King George Vl
This poem is quoted at length, because, while expressing Dhlomo's individual vision, it also captures the ambiguity in the reactions of black intellectuals and notables to the visit of the royal family to South Africa in 1947. Sounding the anger of a generation of Africans at the blighted expectations of the post-war era, Dhlomo gives voice to the hopes and sense of possibility which the royal tour represented to so many at what seemed to be a turning point in the history of the country and of Britain's empire as it stood on the cusp of decolonization. In calling upon the sovereign to oppose ‘all wrong’ in South Africa, Dhlomo was heir to a tradition of what has been described as ‘black loyalism’ which stretched back to the indigenous empire loyalism of eighteenth-century Canada, through pre- and post-Mutiny India and the nineteenth-century Cape.Footnote 2 This encompassed loyalty to the British crown as well as a shared ideology of ‘rights’ and ‘entitlements’ which, in South Africa, developed, particularly amongst the amakholwa (Christianized, educated) Africans, ‘big Coloureds’ and Indian merchant elites in which the British crown figured as a source of protection and succour against white settler rapacity. Far from an unreflective monarchism, expressions of devotion were instrumental, addressing the fundamental contradiction of a crown being at once the source of rights, and complicit in settler conquest and expropriation. These took the form of claims to wider imperial citizenship, or appeals to the crown against actions deemed inimical to the spirit of liberal empire and its ‘civilizing mission’. This loyalty was most visible on occasions of British royal celebrations during which parades, fireworks, bonfires, balls, and other entertainments were held in the monarch's honour, and during royal visits in the reign of Queen Victoria, who more than any other monarch, epitomized the ideal of the sovereign as protector and benefactor. ‘Her name, “Setori”’, wrote the moTswana historian Modiri Molema, ‘was a talisman … a guarantee of immutability and almost of immortality’.Footnote 3 Despite the repeated failures on the part of the monarchy to fulfil these expectations, most notably in the ‘betrayal’ of black interests after the South African War, and the creation of an exclusive white state in 1910, proclamations of loyalty to crown and empire as deliberate ripostes to settler despotism continued well into the twentieth century.Footnote 4 In countless speeches, addresses, and petitions, faith was declared that ‘we natives will be protected against such legislation as may have a tendency to deprive us, the native subjects of the British Throne, of our rights as British subjects’.Footnote 5 Loyalist and royalist sentiment was also regularly rekindled at the many public rituals held to mark jubilees, deaths, and coronations of monarchs and was ardently proclaimed during both world wars, when the crown unambiguously took precedence over both the South African and British governments in the hierarchy of black loyalism.Footnote 6
Inflected by regional, class, and ethnic agendas, this royalism was also always double-edged, containing within it what has been described as a ‘subversive subtext’.Footnote 7 The mannered proclamations of loyalty were a means of making moral claims on the monarchy as well as disguising and ventilating less than loyal feelings. During the 1925 visit of the prince of Wales to South Africa, in a decade of intense radicalization of black politics, the Transvaal Native Mine Clerks' Association expressed the wish that rather than ‘being impressed by us as good singers and War Dancers’, his presence ‘amongst us as Native Labourers will impress you with our crying needs and what we deserve in order that we may improve our positions as loyal subjects of His Majesty the King along the accepted paths of European Civilisation’.Footnote 8 This pained awareness of dependency upon, and betrayal by, Britain was famously expressed by the renowned Xhosa imbongi (praise poet), Samuel Mqhayi, at one of the indabas during the same royal visit: addressing the prince in the region's praise poetry genre, Mqhayi's extravagant praises also contained criticism: ‘You sent us the truth, denied us the truth; / You sent us the life, deprived us of life; / You sent us the light, we sit in the dark, / Shivering, benighted in the bright noon-day sun.’Footnote 9
However, just as popular African enthusiasm for the prince of Wales's 1925 visit contradicted the more jaundiced and cynical views, Africans and their leaders participated in overwhelming numbers in ceremonies mounted to welcome the royal family to the Union in 1947. In so doing, they reaffirmed their loyalty to the king and the British connection, renewing their claim to the rights and freedoms enjoyed by the king's white subjects. But beyond overtly political assertions, what is striking about black responses to the royal visit is the warmth and spontaneity that so often broke through the stylized celebrations and coded speeches. Impromptu choirs at rural train stations, massive crowds lining the streets as the royal family progressed through towns and cities, poetry and music composed in the king's honour, offerings of gifts ranging from karosses to assegais and paintings, epic journeys taken across mountain and veld to witness the king in person, and the collections made by chiefs to assist his British subjects suffering fuel shortages in a cruel winter – all attest to popular enthusiasm and affective bonds that went deeper than purely strategic declarations of loyalty or ‘ornamental constitutionalism’ would imply.Footnote 10
If the rapturous black response was one trope in the copious media coverage of the tour, another in the black press was that it was the ‘non-European’ events that most powerfully affected the royal family. Members of the royal party might well have carried private thoughts about the intractability of South Africa's ‘colour problem’,Footnote 11 but, as African journalists enjoyed pointing out, ‘there is no getting away from the fact that the high-lights of the tour have been when Their Majesties were welcomed by African people’.Footnote 12 The queen and princesses were reputedly entranced by the singing of Africans and by the spontaneous renderings of Nkosi sikelel' iAfrika by children at remote rural stations. One biographer of the present queen goes so far as to claim that however controlled, contact with black South Africans represented a formative experience for Princess Elizabeth who would later develop a particular interest in the affairs of the region. Once she became queen, this known sympathy for the plight of South Africans would have material consequences; rumours of her disapproval of Margaret Thatcher's stance on sanctions against South Africa in the 1980s, for example, confirmed the idea that the monarch, as head of the Commonwealth, stood apart from mere governments on such questions.Footnote 13 But rather than the impact on Britain and its royal family, this article focuses on aspects of the tour which have been neglected in overviews of the tour and by historians of black politics in this period.Footnote 14
Where featured in the literature, the tour is depicted as a double failure. Counterposed against the euphoria of the royal visit is the victory of D. F. Malan and the National Party at the polls in the following year, followed by the installation of apartheid, and, later, the withdrawal of South Africa from the Commonwealth. If the focus is moved from questions of ‘success’ or ‘failure’ and from white responses and the election of 1948, however, the tour can be seen as of some political moment, and as both a highpoint and the swansong of black loyalism. However evanescent, it was a moment that remained lodged in popular memory for its affirmation of nobler values than those later imposed. Five years after the tour, while the National Party was entrenching its political hold, many Africans, particularly traditionalists, mourned the death of King George VI, recalling their ‘rejoicing’ in 1947 when they had met him ‘in the flesh’.Footnote 15 That memory was revived nearly fifty years later when Mandela's democratic republic reapplied for membership of the Commonwealth and when, on her visit to the newly democratic South Africa in 1994, the queen was greeted by cheering township crowds waving banners saying ‘Thank you for coming back.’Footnote 16
While focusing on African elites across the country, this article also sheds light on the varied ways in which the widest cross-section of Africans – lawyer, city politician, chief, journalist, washerwoman, miner, and peasant – engaged with the tour, on the reactions ranging from begrudging silence and open defiance to, mainly, wholehearted participation. In so doing, it draws together two discrete historiographical strands. First, the diffusion of imperial culture, especially through spectacular devices such as durbars and royal tours that emphasized imperial and monarchical grander. This story has mostly been told from the vantage point of the metropolitan heartland, and emphasizing the constitutive influence of empire in British culture and politics.Footnote 17 Instead, in foregrounding African experiences of the royal tour, this article takes its cue from the pioneering work of Terence Ranger, who examined the ways in which Africans indigenized, contested, and revitalized the imperial cult of monarchy in the early twentieth century, to make it serve local African agendas.Footnote 18 The second historiographical strand is the literature on black politics in South Africa. Notwithstanding recent shifts in South African historical writing, with greater attention given especially to culture, language, identity, and representation, a ‘resistance paradigm’ continues to influence perspectives on black politics and consciousness in the twentieth century. Implicitly and explicitly, sentiments such as ‘black loyalism’ are portrayed as ‘regressive’, ‘naive’, and ‘backward’ or as a form of inauthentic ‘colonial mimicry’. It is also generally assumed that the anachronistic faith of ‘black Englishmen’ had gone into abeyance by the end of the First World War when most accounts of the phenomenon usually end. Certainly, by the 1940s, an era of unprecedented black protest, it is taken as a given that the older loyalties and hopes had been rendered archaic. A close study of African engagement with the 1947 royal tour suggests, however, that this was not entirely yet the case. Heated debates in political circles about how to respond to the segregated celebrations of welcome in 1947 are revealing of the vitality and variety of discourses of black loyalism. Notwithstanding the saliency of nationalist and Africanist languages and new rights-based discourses, monarchy, and empire retained a place in the African political imaginary, exerted an effective hold, and continued to provide points of political and moral reference. In part, this was because like all ‘invented traditions’, black loyalism had been revitalized; it had been invested with meanings appropriate to the democratizing ethos of the post-war world. That monarchy had been strongly identified with democracy and freedom during the war, and the fact that at that very moment, the king's relative, Lord Mountbatten, was in India negotiating Britain's withdrawal, gave substance to beliefs that professed gratitude for black contributions to the war might be rewarded with the extension of political rights. The liberalism of the transatlantic alliance, the increasingly close relationship between the British Labour government and the monarchy, and the crown's identification with Labour's social vision, gave substance to these hopes, and fed into the sometimes millennial feelings unleashed by the war's close and the royal visit.Footnote 19 By focusing on this passionate, if ephemeral, faith, this article confirms a recent portrayal of the 1940s as fluid, and unpredictable, when new possibilities, even from a royal tour, seemed to abound.Footnote 20 In the words of a Shangaan poet, D. P. P. Marolen, it was hoped that ‘Peradventure thy sojourn here, O' King / Ushers in its train a new / An era of peace, happiness and progress.’Footnote 21
The tour, of course, was also imbued with multiple meanings by diverse groups; chief and commoner, servant, office ‘boy’, and labourer made the royal tour significant to themselves. The fact that the royal visit coincided with rains after a long wait was widely interpreted as providential, while the event served as a marker in people's lives leading one bemused Xhosa observer to reflect that ‘if a tax was placed on naming babies Elizabeth, Margaret and George, it would help to pay for the expense of bringing the King to South Africa’.Footnote 22 Expressions of loyalism were inflected by very domestic and immediate concerns. Loyalist discourses could be manipulated by local – often traditionalist – elites – to enhance their own authority and to assert ethnic and nationalist identities, and could also help sharpen internal debates, for example, about how to claim rights, or how to liberate a Zulu or Xhosa community from the isolation of segregation, or to convert ‘native loyalty’ into concrete political gains. They reveal sharp ideological contrasts such as a resurgence of an African-inflected ‘civilizing mission’ ideology alongside assertions of African nationalism and rejections of white trusteeship. Indeed, the event served as an arena in which larger questions of identity, citizenship, and governance in post-war South Africa were debated. Predominant amongst the concerns to which the tour gave rise, was the deeply segregated and discriminatory character of South African society, elements of which were built into the very structure of the tour. These debates and discussions were all expressed in highly public forums, particularly the black press, which provides the most substantial sources for this article. But the role of newspapers and the media also highlights a subsidiary theme of this article: the battle for representation that was fought out in film, print, gesture, and speech at a moment when South Africa was uniquely caught in the international spotlight. Virtually every occasion was filmed, recorded, photographed, and chronicled in a profusion of souvenir books, magazines, newspaper articles, special supplements, commemorative stamps, and medals. Both the government and its African critics seized upon this outpouring as a means to project opposing visions of the country. Whereas the government sought to use images of popular enthusiasm to demonstrate black contentment with advances made by a benign administration, some African intellectuals and politicians considered the tour a ‘heaven sent opportunity’ simultaneously to proclaim their loyalty and expose to an international audience, the ‘dark and reactionary forces … denying Africans democratic rights’.Footnote 23 The contest was not negligible, as revealed in at least one response from the United States during the tour. ‘To eyes’, wrote the British ambassador in Washington,
which have been regaled by photographs of tumbledown hutments and ragged undernourished negroes in the slums of Johannesburg, it was undoubtedly a surprise to read the reports of the enthusiastic welcome given Their Majesties by the negro, coloured and particularly the Indian community.
This, he went on,
must have carried to the more … thoughtful the conviction that there might be something to be said for the claim which General Smuts had made that the Union was trying to travel both far and fast in its efforts to create a nation out of the congeries of races whose customs and environment ranged from the Stone Age to the Twentieth Century.Footnote 24
I
The royal tour to South Africa in 1947 was the first visit to a dominion by the sovereign after the war and the first visit by a British royal family to any dominion. The South African premier, Jan Smuts, had proposed the visit the previous year. The key aim, which Smuts shared with the British government and the royal family, was to use the crown's charisma to galvanize support for his United Party in the face of an ascendant Afrikaner nationalism. The fear was that a National Party victory might result in the loss of South Africa to the Commonwealth at a delicate moment of decolonization in Asia. There was much at stake for Smuts personally. In 1946, the soldier-statesman who had written the preamble to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, found himself condemned in its general assembly for breaching the human rights of South Africa's Indian population, and for the attempts to incorporate the mandated territory of South West Africa within the Union. Although Smuts's reputation in Britain remained luminous, this humiliation represented the beginning of his ignominious political decline in the face of democratizing internationalism abroad and challenges at home.Footnote 25 A successful royal tour held out the prospects of restoring his tainted image, energizing the United Party, and parlaying the criticisms of radicals and critics who drew unwelcome attention to the poverty, oppression, and discrimination experienced by the majority population of South Africa.
Royal tours to the empire, which originated in the visit of Queen Victoria's son Prince Alfred to the Cape and Natal in 1860, were the direct descendants of the great domestic progresses of Queen Elizabeth I. They had evolved to provide a means of associating successive generations of the royal family with the empire, to parade the symbols of imperial hierarchy before the subjects of empire, and allow them the chance to display their loyalty. In its modern incarnation, the royal tour drew on the vision of George V who, in 1901, had visited South Africa as part of one of the longest world-wide tours. This visit in turn paved the way for his Christmas radio broadcasts to the empire in the thirties, and Edward VIII made his name with a series of empire tours including his successful visit to South Africa in 1925.Footnote 26 During the war, there was an acute awareness of the need to make the king personally visible to his remoter subjects if he and his successors were to retain a hold on the latter's affections. The king had proposed a visit to his ‘forgotten army’ in Burma in 1944 and to travel across India meeting people in an informal atmosphere. Thwarted by the war cabinet in this wish,Footnote 27 Smuts's invitation provided the first opportunity after the war for the royal family to present themselves directly to the peoples of the empire and to express Britain's gratitude for their sacrifices.
The desire of the crown to strengthen local attachment to it, and by extension to Britain and the Commonwealth, was shared by Whitehall, particularly as India's independence edged ever closer. As the Washington-based World Review put it, ‘there is the hope that continuing loyalty from South Africa will be impressive to India and Burma. King George may strengthen the Government's hand in maintaining order’.Footnote 28 The tour also held a particular significance in the new, post-war ‘multi-cultural’ definition of the Commonwealth, as it offered a means of demonstrating the interest of both the British government and the monarchy in ‘race relations’, which was predicted to loom increasingly large in many of the countries which owed allegiance to the crown.Footnote 29 This awareness was reflected in a speech by the king in Cape Town, which, in some African quarters, was read as the king's rejection of segregation.Footnote 30 Referring to the challenges facing the country, he declared his confidence in Smuts's statesmanship to guide him ‘steadily towards a just and contented relationship between all dwellers in your many-peopled land’. Moreover, he suggested ‘success in this would’ show a troubled world how peoples of different race and colour may live and work together for the common good.Footnote 31
In South Africa, the growth of Afrikaner nationalism indeed posed a formidable threat to Smuts. Although the passionate republicanism of many nationalists unnerved English-speakers, in reality, it was not yet the most important campaigning cause of the National Party. It was rather their radical ‘visionary’ approaches to the ‘native question’ that would carry them to power in 1948. Their electoral slogan, ‘apartheid’, was formulated in response to a series of urban crises combined with what seemed to be a policy of ‘drift’ on the part of the Smuts government, and its apparent abandonment of racial segregation altogether. In the run-up to the election of 1948, the Nationalists exploited fears of a ‘second trek’ of Africans to the cities, suffusing white political discourse with the slogans of the swart gevaar (‘black peril’) and the oorstroming (swamping) of the cities. Simultaneously, Nationalist ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ sought to remake a world shaped by British culture and the English language into one in which Afrikaner sensibilities predominated. The contrast between Smuts's apparent disdain for these endeavours and his wholehearted absorption in the royal tour confirmed his image as out of touch with Afrikaner political sensitivities and cultural aspirations.Footnote 32
The years preceding the tour were of intense political turmoil amongst all black communities, a watershed in the history of African politics in South Africa. The massive tide of African migration to the cities during the war years and the accompanying privations contributed to an unprecedented surge of industrial and popular militancy and widespread black political disaffection between 1940 and 1946.Footnote 33 From the early 1940s township politics was radicalized as various forms of civil resistance (strikes, stay-aways, bus boycotts, teachers' protests, land invasions led by charismatic demagogues) meshed with more assertive stances by African municipal bodies such as advisory boards and vigilance associations, and the militancy of the African National Congress (ANC) and Communist Party. No institution or region was immune; strikes rocked the largest rural African mission schools and colleges between 1945 and 1947, and intermittent unrest flared up in the Ciskei, Transkei, and Witsieshoek in protest against the government's controversial ‘betterment schemes’ designed to address the underdevelopment in the reserves.Footnote 34 Stimulated by this insurgent spirit, a younger generation of leaders rejected the constitutionalism and politics of supplication practised by their elders and espoused an increasingly assertive African nationalism. ‘Africanist’ ideas were preached by magnetic young leaders like Anton Lembede and A. P. Mda, who, together with individuals such as Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela, and Oliver Tambo, guided the ANC in more confrontational directions. The ANC was rebuilt under Alfred B. Xuma's leadership into a mass-based party with a more radical campaigning agenda. Like their West African nationalist contemporaries, the ANC defined their political aspirations in an international framework; taking up the 1941 Atlantic Charter, it demanded full citizenship rights for Africans. Despite genuine attempts by the administration to address social and economic grievances, Smuts's refusal to meet with Xuma, and his preference for the ‘trusteeship’ idea over conceding political rights to black South Africans, deepened this alienation. Added to this mix was the potent combination of idealism and frustration of returning African soldiers with their expanded political horizons and thwarted expectations.Footnote 35
II
If the tour was to put the king in contact with as many South Africans as possible, none of this could be achieved by ‘perching at various Government Houses and “doing things” from a stationary centre … The only way was constant travel, up and down and in and out of the whole Union – in fact, a sort of prolonged Coronation Procession’.Footnote 36 It began with a rapturous welcome at Cape Town on 17 February, as the HMS Vanguard glided into the docks, a glittering state banquet, and the symbolically freighted opening of parliament by the king. The royal family took up residence in the luxurious ‘white train’ for thirty-five nights travelling through the Cape, the Orange Free State, Basutoland, Natal, and the Transvaal, and thereafter to the Rhodesias and Bechuanaland before returning to Cape Town. Charged with highly political aims, this twentieth-century royal progress entailed a strenuous programme of balls, banquets, receptions, pageants, marches-past, ‘native gatherings’, and meetings with the white worthies of small towns, all in the gruelling heat of a South African summer. The tour itinerary was meticulously planned with an eye to international and domestic audiences. Care was given to reinforcing ‘kith and kin’ ties with English-speaking South Africans, and to honouring Afrikaner traditions and culture. The immense publicity given to the tour meant that at its culminating moment – the celebrated speech of Princess Elizabeth dedicating her life to the ‘service of our great Imperial Commonwealth to which we all belong’ on her twenty-first birthday – South Africa commanded the world's attention.Footnote 37
Whilst royal tours elsewhere in the empire were and have been events highlighting national solidarity and unity in ‘true South African style’, the tour was ‘soaked in segregation’.Footnote 38 State banquets, civic balls, and garden parties at government houses were all white affairs, while separate events were organized for coloured, Indian, and African publics in ‘native reserves’, selected city squares and open spaces, a mission school, segregated townships, and in a miners' compound. Whereas the princesses danced with members of the public at the ‘white’ civic ball in Cape Town, at its coloured counterpart, they were placed high on a balcony to watch the dazzling array of dancers and a Malay wedding enactment.Footnote 39 No opportunities were created for presenting leaders from the Indian and African congresses to the royal family, and to the chagrin of many Africans, it was presumed that the presentation to the royal family of the (white) native representatives who sat in parliament and the senate would suffice.Footnote 40 Even where provision was made for all ‘races’ to line city streets, separate areas of the pavements were allocated to ‘Europeans’ and ‘non-Europeans’ to prevent racially mixed crowds.
At the same time, from the earliest planning stages, the Native Affairs Department (NAD) fought to increase the numbers of indabas (‘native gatherings’) on the itinerary to ensure that the inhabitants of each of the ‘native’ territories had the opportunity to honour their sovereign. Insisting that the ‘steadfast loyalty of the Natives during the war’ entitled them more than any other group to the king's personal acknowledgement, native affairs officials warned that failure to ensure this would be ‘a calamity of the first order’.Footnote 41 Whilst prompted by the paternalism that characterized NAD reserve officials' special sense of duty to their African ‘wards’, as in the 1920s, these large indabas were also seen as an antidote to radical political ideas and organizations, especially communism. Invoking a well-worn argument about the susceptibility of ‘the Native’ to chiefly and monarchical forms of rule and their love of ‘panoply’, the secretary of native affairs hoped that the royal visit would help ‘counter the rising discontent which is being played on by the agitators’. Here, he argued, ‘is a chance of letting him see the Supreme Chief idea at its highest, as represented by His Majesty himself’.Footnote 42 The indabas were also seen as opportunities for countering the criticisms of territorial segregation of which native reserves were the lynchpin. British visitors and international audiences could be shown the ‘advances’ taking place under a benign NAD, and the wisdom of a gradualist approach towards political and economic development. In the Transkei, the royal party could witness the ‘tribal system’ undergoing ‘a process of evolution’ and a ‘perfect example of the completely unsophisticated Native … emerging into a much more advanced state’. One official proposed that a visit to a cattle dipping station in the reserves would highlight the progressive character of their agricultural policies and provide ‘an ocular demonstration of the wealth of the Natives in our reserves’.Footnote 43 Juxtaposing the ‘unique’ sights of tribal life against signs of ‘civilisation and progress attained by Natives’ was precisely the purpose in inviting the eminent moTswana author and doctor, Modiri Molema – who was also ‘of royal descent’ – to deliver an address of welcome at the indaba in Pietersburg.Footnote 44
Drawing on the precedents of previous royal tours and visits by governors general, the four indabas were quintessentially ornamentalist shows which paraded a hierarchy of power with the British king at it its apex, ruling through loyal chiefs and headmen.Footnote 45 Although tailored to the different regional cultures, indabas shared a repetitive formula which, above all, emphasized monarchical paternalism, and thereby confirmed existing patterns of political authority. African men, women, and children, their chiefs and headmen arranged in order of their seniority, gathered in their thousands in vast open spaces before the thatched erstatz- African royal dais. A lounge-suited ‘native’ representative delivered a declaration of loyalty, to which the king, resplendent in tropical whites, responded, thanking his subjects for their wartime sacrifices and gently exhorting them to co-operate with the officials ‘for your own benefit’.Footnote 46 Medallions and commemorative photographs were given to hand-picked chiefs, and the royal party would depart in their gleaming Daimlers to the sounds of crowds roaring ‘Bayete’ or ‘Pula’. The slaughter of a few hundred head of cattle to feed those gathered would end ‘a perfect day’.Footnote 47
Apart from the striking photographic and cinematographic opportunities offered by the sight of a 4,000-strong group of Zulu dancers performing the Ngoma Mukos (royal dance), or a ‘native regatta’ on the Zambezi River, a key ambition of the region's native affairs officials was to project images of ‘tradition’ from which Africans were emerging on their journey to modernity. As the notes prepared for the king by the government ethnologist expressed it, ‘Zulus of today stand with one foot in the present and with the other in the past of centuries' ago.’Footnote 48 But if the idioms of tradition were invoked by officials to emphasize African ‘backwardness’ and to bolster chiefly authority, the celebration of traditional custom offered a powerful lexicon through which African chiefs and commoners could affirm the relationship between their own royal houses and the House of Windsor and project their cultural identities.Footnote 49 This was as true for many ‘progressive’ urban intellectuals and politicians; invoking the irony that African independence had been extinguished in the nineteenth century in the name of the British monarch, Herbert Dhlomo remarked how the presence of the king in South Africa evoked ‘memories of the days of Black Rulers and of tribal democracy’.Footnote 50 Similarly, while chief Albert Luthuli, the ANC leader and future Nobel Prize winner, had moved away from the cultural nationalism of the Zulu Cultural Society in favour of wider forms of African identity, his formal address to the king at the Eshowe indaba reflected a widespread desire amongst isiZulu-speaking intellectuals to preserve, celebrate, and display aspects of Zulu culture and heritage. Drawing on precolonial traditions of Zulu praise poetry to exalt royal figures and their ancestors, and heroic metaphors likening kings to wild animals, he proclaimed, ‘Just as when the lion roars, all nature is hushed, as when Your Majesty speaks to us we will listen to Your Majesty in silent awe, knowing that only wisdom will come from your lips.’Footnote 51
The indabas also saw the playing out of local political controversies and agendas. In the same way as the son of the last Zulu king, Solomon ka Dinuzulu, famously used the indaba in honour of the prince of Wales in 1925 to enhance his own claims,Footnote 52 the 1947 indaba at Eshowe was entangled in a bitter controversy surrounding a recent dispute over the succession to the Zulu paramountcy. The prominence in the proceedings of the deposed regent, Mshiyeni, and the NAD employee, Pika Zulu, was widely resented and commented upon in the press, as was the weakness and inadequacy of ‘native administration’ in Zululand.Footnote 53 But, perhaps what is most notable about these events was the sheer size of the audiences and the élan and enthusiasm of the crowds which ranged from 12,000 at King Williams Town to 80,000 at Eshowe and 100,000 in Maseru.Footnote 54 The indabas themselves engendered massive processionals as Africans made their ways to the designated meeting places by bus, lorry, train, and by foot. City-based migrants were summoned by their chiefs to attend; on a visit to Johannesburg to have his uniform fitted for the indaba, Prince Cyprian, the twenty-year-old Zulu paramount designate exhorted isiZulu-speaking miners to ‘welcome the Royal Family with songs and dances at Eshowe’.Footnote 55 Cyprian himself left Nongoma with his large personal retinue staying each night at the kraals of important chiefs in the Mahlabatini and Melmoth districts before riding into Eshowe. Epic journeys were taken across the country. ‘Thousands of natives are moving like an army converging on Eshowe’ wrote one journalist: ‘They are trekking by foot and donkey wagon. They have built fires on the veld and are spending the night under bushes.’Footnote 56 Similarly, Sotho migrants living on the Witwatersrand or Bloemfontein travelled by train to Maseru to attend the pitso, often in parties such as the ‘Sons and Daughters of Basutoland Association’, while a ‘blanketed throng’ went by foot and horseback through mountain passes and down precipitous ravines to Basutoland. Men, women, and children slept in the veld or in caves en route and roasted their meat in traditional ovens of anthill dug out of and filled with fire. ‘At each resting place’, according to one account, ‘they sing their war cries and women from nearby villages, knowing they come in peace, sometimes bring them food. Old men are coming to see the successor to the Great White Queen.’Footnote 57
Because of the sheer size of the African populations that had mushroomed in the cities by 1947, it was impossible for the tour organizers to overlook them. Indeed, white liberals and urban ‘native administrators’ were anxious to ensure that adequate participation be facilitated for urban Africans, and were fearful that excluding or slighting them would provide the pretext for a rumoured boycott.Footnote 58 So, for the first time ever, royal visitors entered the country's segregated African townships on the cities' margins, if only to drive briefly through their hastily tarred streets. Unlike the indabas, the ‘invented tradition’ invoked was not of ‘tribalism’, but of urban modernity, civility, and associational life, embodied in the serried ranks of schoolchildren, scouts, ex-servicemen, nurses, respectable advisory board and Native Representative Council (NRC) members, sporting events, bonfires, flags, and brass bands. Although it was more likely for boycotts of the tour to take hold in the volatile cities with their youthful and disaffected populations, the officials need not have worried; black urbanites turned out to these functions in their thousands. Indeed, communities demanded their fair share of the royals. By threatening non-cooperation, the advisory boards of the Johannesburg townships compelled the white-controlled Civic Welcome Committee to revise an original plan of a peremptory drive through Orlando in present-day Soweto, into a proper visit, and the advisory board of Atteridgeville township, in Pretoria demanded an opportunity to welcome the royal party.Footnote 59 Like the indabas, massive crowds comprising all sections of township society gathered for every function, amongst them, ‘office messengers, delivery boys, factory hands, kitchen boys, washerwomen and house girls, with a fair sprinkling of very young children or babies … dressed in what were obviously the finest clothes they could muster for this occasion of a lifetime’.Footnote 60 In the newly built ‘New Brighton’ township of Port Elizabeth, the streets thronged with 20,000 well-wishers. As the royal family rode through the enormous archway proclaiming the township's welcome, they were greeted by ‘native witchdoctors’, Red Cross workers, Pathfinders and Wayfarers (African versions of scouts and guides), the Xhosa paramount chief's ageing sister, clergymen and congregants of the ‘Bantu Church of Christ’, men, women, and children of all ages chanting A Sozizwe, a sozizwe! (Father of nations).Footnote 61 An even larger crowd of 100,000 gave the royals a thunderous welcome to Orlando. At a function attended by thirty members of Johannesburg's various advisory boards and two Witwatersrand members of the NRC, the king inspected ex-servicemen, listened to a choir of 6,000 African children while the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association Band played to ‘wildly cheering crowds’. For one resident, ‘the whole scene was reminiscent of the old days when African men, women and children would assemble in the place for a pitso’. The fact that the reigning monarch had visited ‘their place residence’ was described as a source of immense pride. For many, for whom the king's visit had gone too fast: ‘like a hailstorm he had suddenly come and gone’.Footnote 62
Middle-class amarespectables improvised celebrations to accompany the formal municipal functions organized on their behalf, and as a riposte to the exclusively white cultural festivities in the cities. On the morning of the royal visit to Pietermaritzburg, crowds were entertained by the Rhythm Cloud Swing Band, Swing Aces Band, and by gramophone records booming through loudspeakers. That evening, the entertainments continued at the illuminated Native Village recreation hall with the music of Pietermaritzburg bands such as the Ikhwezi, and the Mexican Brothers and by the Gamma Sigma Club choirs.Footnote 63 The musician and composer Reuben Caluza composed a song of welcome for the royal party to Ladysmith,Footnote 64 and in Durban, the popular theatre group the Steamline Sisters performed at the Bantu Social Centre, which also hosted ‘A Royal Visit Carnival Concert and Dance’, featuring the Makhaza Dancing Brothers and their Mast Magician. The latter event was attended by luminaries such as Selby Msimang, the provincial secretary of the Natal ANC; the vice chairman of the Durban African and European Joint Council, local clerics and members of the combined location advisory boards, as well as members of the Durban Indian community.Footnote 65
Although the tour confirmed the segregationist order of things, with Africans being literally chased away from the streets,Footnote 66 the event also allowed for the claiming of space and rights, and thus, implicitly, a challenge to segregationist codes. On the occasion of the opening of the graving docks at East London by Princess Elizabeth, African crowds ensured they ‘had princesses to themselves’ by filling the pavements and streets awaiting the royal family while the white townsfolk were gathered at the harbour.Footnote 67 Residents of Alexandra township took pride in being the first Johannesburgers to greet the royal family as they drove into the city. They flocked to the roadside where a children's choir sang Nkosi sikelele Afrika and a fife band wearing kilts of Royal Stuart tartan welcomed the royal party with ‘Scottish airs’.Footnote 68 An overly zealous former soldier, Kayser Sithole caused consternation when he attempted to press a gift upon the royal family as they drove through the Witwatersrand town of Benoni, prompting the queen, fearing an attack, to beat him back with her parasol.Footnote 69
If the above account does not do justice to the complex regional, class, gendered, and ethnic forms taken by black loyalism, the vignettes should provide at least a glimpse into a uniquely jubilant moment. Without suggesting that loyalism can be ‘read off’ in an unreflexive way from these tumultuous receptions, hundreds of thousands of black South Africans were undoubtedly captivated by a sense of portent associated with the visit. For some, nostalgia was powerfully evoked. Many members of the African crowds would have experienced previous royal processionals and ceremonies; the reiteration of rituals that comprised the ‘invented tradition’ of loyalism, would have touched a deep sense of familiarity and longing that could not always be coherently articulated. Modiri Molema recalled the royal visit to his home Barolong stadt of Mafikeng amidst ‘unforgettable demonstrations of joy and loyalty’ as the ‘crowning excellence’ of previous royal visits,Footnote 70 while the intellectual and elder statesman of black politics, D. D. T. Jabavu, reminisced about the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, ‘when she cabled to the African people in Kingwilliamstown … to wish all her subject people a happy celebration’:
Today, we … felt as if we had been suddenly transfigured by a magic wand and wafted back to the year 1897, back to fifty years ago though for only fifty minutes. We felt we were in a new South Africa as we suppressed a few tears of emotional reminiscence. For a time we forgot our social sullenness and political depression. We wished the Royal Family could stay with us for good in order to continue their benign and healing influence.Footnote 71
Certainly, the celebrations provided something entirely different from the messages intended by organizers and elites; the spectacular pageantry, free food, the release from the tedium of work, the exhilaration of taking to the streets in large mixed crowds, and the overturning of daily routines were no doubt significant attractions for many township inhabitants. In the reserves, whilst under strong compulsion of chiefs and ‘native officials’ to attend the ceremonies, performers in ‘war dances’ and ‘tribal pageants’ surely enjoyed expressive release and pleasure in the sheer physical exertion, tapping into deep cultural traditions of dance, poetry, and song.Footnote 72
III
‘Whatever our quarrel with the Union government’, explained a coloured member of the Moslem Youth Corps, ‘we are all loyal British subjects of King George Vl and I would certainly not miss the opportunity of paying him homage.’ This sentiment was widely shared, as Inkundla, the black newspaper most sympathetic to the ANC Youth League acknowledged, pointing out that the visit was ‘a cause for great rejoicing among many Africans who still viewed the British sovereign as their ultimate protector’.Footnote 73 Nevertheless, the press coverage of African enthusiasm belied the existence of dissent and unease. There was bitter criticism of the tour, particularly from educated elites. ‘What they objected to’, observed the high commissioner, ‘was the making of arrangements’ which underlined ‘white supremacy’ and which ‘did not allow Their Majesties to speak on more than very few occasions with their African subjects’.Footnote 74 From a local perspective, Ilanga voiced the resentment at the failure of the NAD to consult with ‘Zulu representative opinion’ in the planning of the indaba, and it used the occasion to call for the creation of a council to advise the Zulu royal house and the ‘Head of the Zulu Nation’ which could work alongside ‘a true national organization of the people such as Congress’.Footnote 75 Others objected to the segregated nature of the functions and the essentialist representations of their cultures. Some amakholwa felt demeaned by the dominance of ‘tribal gatherings’ and complained that these compromised their ‘civilized’ status. They bridled at being ‘displayed as exotic natives doing traditional dances’ arguing that if the government ‘present these uneducated people it may make the case for our oppression’.Footnote 76 In similar vein, invoking ‘civilizing mission’ ideology, one correspondent railed against the display of ‘half naked’ Africans and pointed out that the failure to ensure that the royal party met with ‘educated and Christian Africans’ in Natal created the impression that ‘heathenism is being bolstered up, whilst any efforts towards the acquisition of western civilisation, education and Christianity are restrained’.Footnote 77 Criticisms were made of the king's speeches which endorsed segregationist policies and institutions such as the Bunga (Transkeian General Council) or the controversial betterment schemes in the reserves.Footnote 78 Many complaints were made about the insensitivity of tour organizers and the petty insults to Africans especially at the Durban and Pietersburg gatherings.Footnote 79 Africans were outraged by ‘white gatecrashers’ at Pietersburg who barged in front of the children's choir, obscuring the latter's view of the royal dais. They resented being declined permission to present gifts to the royal family in accordance with custom, complaining that ‘to our people the ceremony was incomplete’.Footnote 80 There was also the refusal of permission to the wife of Modiri Molema to present a bouquet to the queen on the grounds that she was not a ‘native’. Dr Molema, the appointed ‘native representative’ at the Pietersburg indaba was one of its most bitter critics. Lambasting the NAD for the slighting of Africans, particularly former servicemen, and disallowing the presentation of Africans to the king, he wrote, ‘true to South African worst traditions, it was again “Europeans Only.”’Footnote 81 Echoing this sentiment, a Communist Party journalist pointed out that the royal visit was ‘intended as a white man's show. The natives were supposed to keep in their place. i.e. third class, in a back seat.’Footnote 82
Other critics were cynical about the tour's likely benefits to black South Africans: ‘What will the new session [of Parliament] which has opened with the greatest display of pomp and pageantry bring to the Non-Europeans?’ asked a coloured journalist',Footnote 83 while the leader writer of the Torch commented that after the ‘hullaballo’ was over ‘Coloured (and Malay), Indian and African alike will once again be faced with the reality of daily life and toil in the slave colony, South Africa.’Footnote 84 While one response was simply to keep away from the celebrations on an individual basis, some political organizations called for a boycott, and the use of the publicity to ‘demonstrate before the whole world their lack of political rights, their social and economic exploitation’.Footnote 85 This was the position taken by coloured organizations such as the African Political Organization (APO) or the Non-European Peoples Movement (NEUM) for which boycotting the royal tour was a natural extension of their strategies of boycotting ‘collaborationist’ institutions. This position was also taken by the Communist Party which advocated the boycott on the basis of republicanism and anti-imperialism. Arguing that monarchy's chief function in the modern world was to be a ‘symbol of empires’, the Communist Party declared its rejection of hereditary monarchy. This ‘backward and undemocratic institution’ belonged to the ‘childhood of the human race’, opined an Inkululeko columnist.Footnote 86 Communist Party and NEUM critics drew attention to the unseemly opulence of the White Train and lavish entertainments in a ‘land of dreadful poverty’, noting how ‘careful thought’ had been given to obscure from the royal view the reality of the parched reserves.Footnote 87 Party members also criticized the cupidity of those swept up in an epidemic of ‘royalitis’ and their naive belief that ‘the King stood above politics, and that he was opposed to the Colour Bar’.Footnote 88 When, despaired one writer, ‘will our people … grow up out of their political childhood?’ and ‘cease to be attracted like little children, by the pomp and colourful ceremony with which the Herrenvolk time and again drugs them?’Footnote 89
The Communist Party and the NEUM were alone in opposing black participation in the ceremonial activities on anti-monarchist, republican, and anti-imperialist grounds. It is telling that while so effective in articulating African grievances in this period, the party failed to be attuned to this welling up of loyalism and popular monarchism. By contrast, other black political organizations directed their criticisms solely at the South African government. Even advocates of a boycott insisted that they wished no discourtesy to the royal family. The Indian Opinion, for example, expressed its ‘profound grief’ at their inability to participate in the ‘joyous celebrations’, emphasizing that this was neither a rejection nor a deliberate act of disrespect.Footnote 90 In similar vein, a coloured politician who refused to accept Cape Town mayor's invitation to a reception emphasized that it was ‘purely because of the trend of present political events in the Union where hundreds of my brethren and sisters are suffering in the jails of the Smuts government’. ‘It would be folly’, he wrote, ‘to expect co-operation from … down trodden people to join hands to make Their Majesties feel that their subjects are contented with the treatment they are subjected to by Their Majesties' Government.’Footnote 91 Members of the Orlando advisory board, who subsequently resigned in protest against the municipality's failure to consult them in the matter of the royal visit, insisted that they had only participated in the event because of their ‘deep sense of loyalty’.Footnote 92
The initiative for the boycott came from the Indian Passive Resistance Movement, which was in full flow in 1946 in protest against the government's attempts to impose the ‘ghetto legislation’ to restrict Indian trading and residential rights, and against which they had pressed their case in the UN under the sponsorship of the Indian government. Both supporters and detractors of the boycott drew on the authority and support of the key Indian politicians of the day, Gandhi (for the pro-boycotters) and Pandit Nehru (for the anti-boycotters).Footnote 93 But the boycott failed, resulting in the deepening of incipient divisions within the Indian congresses over continuing passive resistance. By the time the royal party reached the Natal town of Ladysmith, at least half of its Indian inhabitants were in the streets cheering, and this was repeated in Pietermaritzburg and at Curries Fountain in Durban, where the ‘whole Indian community’ gave the royal family a rapturous welcome, indicating that ‘beyond dispute, the Congress boycott finally collapsed’.Footnote 94
The debates amongst South African Indians were closely followed by the ANC. At its Bloemfontein conference at the end of 1946, a resolution was passed to boycott the royal tour ‘as a protest against the barbarous policy of the Union Government of denying the elementary rights to Africans, and in view of the fact that these injustices are perpetrated and maintained in the name of His Majesty, King George VI’. However, this was contested by Dr R. T. Bokwe, George Champion, and James Calata, and a bitter argument broke out in which those favouring participation were castigated by ‘radicals’ as ‘cowards’.Footnote 95 The Youth League, which had proposed the boycott, was divided itself between those like Dhlomo, who welcomed the royal presence, and individuals like Anton Lembede, who argued passionately against paying homage to the head of a state who had failed to do his moral duty to the African people. There was certainly confusion about the official policy after the conference, and in some areas, ANC leaders told individuals to act according to their own consciences, but not as members of congress.Footnote 96 Leaders across the political spectrum were divided in their stances. Whilst prominent non-ANC notables, such as Paul Mosaka of the African Democratic Party and Dr James Moroka, a NRC member, declined to attend the Pietersburg indaba,Footnote 97 Dr Molema and Chief Albert Luthuli (both ANC members) and D. D. T. Jabavu (NRC member) took up visible roles in the ‘native’ gatherings. Cape congressmen, R. T. Bokwe and Z. K. Matthews, participated in the affair at Lovedale Mission School, which celebrated African educational attainment, while A. B Xuma, the ANC president general, infuriated by the Youth League's boycott call and the Communist Party's promotion of it, flew with his wife, Madie Hall, to Eshowe to attend the indaba. At a meeting of the executive committee of the Johannesburg branch of the ANC over which he presided in February, it was decided by fifteen votes to two against boycotting.Footnote 98 Similarly, the ‘nationalistically orientated’ Transvaal African Students Association, an organization that had been praised by Lembede himself for their wholehearted support of the Youth League, rejected the boycottist position.Footnote 99
In several places, however, local leaders acted on the boycott resolution. At a meeting in the Transkei, held under the combined auspices of the Chiefs' Association and the Transkei Organized Bodies, an umbrella body of disaffected organizations demanding ‘full citizenship rights to all the people’, speakers requested that the ANC's decision to boycott the royal visit be endorsed.Footnote 100 The meeting, however, broke up in disorder, and the boycott call was ignored by the mass of Transkeians.Footnote 101 In the city of East London, it was decided to boycott a proposed meeting with the royal family,Footnote 102 while a gathering in Bloemfontein resolved not to welcome the royal visitors because ‘the King will see the Natives in their usual surroundings – the slaves of the land’.Footnote 103 A protest meeting of a thousand shack dwellers in Johannesburg determined that ‘when the Royal visitors come to Johannesburg we shall hold a meeting as we don't want to take any part in the welcoming activities’.Footnote 104 However, to the authorities' relief, there was little appetite for a boycott in the townships of the Witwatersrand: an advisory board member from the otherwise radicalized township of Springs found no support amongst location dwellers, and only one of Johannesburg's advisory boards favoured a boycott.Footnote 105
The boycott initiative collapsed for reasons considered later. But it should be noted that the newspapers – black and white – purposefully countered the boycotts, emphasizing the ‘unquestionable loyalty of Africans to the British Throne’.Footnote 106 The owner of the white-owned Bantu Press conglomerate which published African newspapers throughout the subcontinent actively promoted the tour and opposed the boycott call.Footnote 107 Whilst a journalist writing for the Chamber of Mines-owned Umteteli wa Bantu opined that the tour would help counter the ‘false impressions that emerged at the UNO’, an Ilanga commentator claimed that the boycott was a ‘cheap publicity stunt’ and a needless distraction from the truly compelling issues such as the struggle for recognition of trades union, against pass laws, land hunger, and urban areas legislation.Footnote 108 Both the Bantu Press newspapers and Umteteli lavishly covered the royal tour's encounter with Africans. Illustrated calendars, supplements, and maps tracking the progress of the tour were issued with newspapers.Footnote 109 A ‘Royal Visit Photographic competition’Footnote 110 was held, while stories about the royal family were turned to didactic and moralizing effect in children's features: associating loyalism and Englishness with classic values of self-improvement amongst the aspirant and respectable, Captain Mahlelehle wrote that he ‘as an ordinary African could … show his appreciation [of the royals] if I improved my knowledge of reading, writing and speaking the King's English’.Footnote 111 Even journals such as The Good Shepherd, organ of the radicalized Transvaal African Teachers Association (TATA) carried photographs and an enthusiastic editorial.Footnote 112 Pro-boycott newspapers themselves reported on the tour's daily progress over the ten weeks, while film footage of the visit reportedly aroused ‘the keenest interest and enthusiasm’ in the crowded mine compound theatres.Footnote 113 What the townships' most dispossessed and impoverished residents made of the celebrations is not known, but the presence of photographs of the king and queen (together with pictures of Betty Grable), tacked on to the hessian walls of at least one shack in Orlando's militant ‘Tobruk’ squatter encampment, underlines the extent to which the culture of empire still penetrated virtually every crevice of South African social life, black and white.Footnote 114
IV
In the face of nation-wide black euphoria, the Communist Party worried about the tour's depoliticizing effects. A Guardian editorial lamented that ‘if the pitch and tone of the people's struggles for freedom can be lowered by these spectacular feudal devices, it will be extremely difficult to recover the ground that has been lost’.Footnote 115 In explaining the political ‘apathy and complacency’, the party blamed congress leaders for failing to explain and popularize their boycott resolution, singling out individuals such as George Champion, the Natal congress president, or Selope Thema, editor of the Bantu World, for criticism.Footnote 116 Part of the answer to the question about the boycott's failure indeed is that apart from the ANC's overall weakness, the leaders were divided in their responses. To some extent the division reflected generational differences. Many of the elders of the ANC, who still retained their dominance, moreover, held a deep reverence for monarchy. In part, this was a result of their Anglophone mission school education where they had observed royal ceremonial occasions and absorbed British liberal political values and the idea that the monarchy stood above mere governments.Footnote 117 Another reason for many leaders' discomfort with a boycott arose from deference towards the sensibilities of traditionally minded chiefs. Although Xuma's constitutional reforms had resulted in the abolition of congress's ‘upper house’ of chiefs, he cultivated close ties with traditional leaders and enjoyed personal relationships with individuals such as Regent Mshiyeni of Zululand, upon whom he had depended for recruitment to the ANC, and Paramount Chief Jongintaba of the Transkei.Footnote 118 Some leading congressmen such as Albert Luthali and Modiri Molema were themselves of chiefly stock. Nelson Mandela, born into the Thembu royal family, and then an up and coming Youth Leaguer, confessed years later to having had mixed feelings about boycotting the royal tour. For all his disdain for British imperialism, he approved of royalty, ‘even of the British variety’.Footnote 119 According to Tom Lodge, because of Mandela's own patrician background, he believed that the monarchy should be respected as an enduring institution. He was also acutely aware of the veneration showed by the Xhosa chiefs for the British monarch. Recalling the way in which the Paramount Chief Velile Sandile ‘pierced the ground’ before the king, Mandela observed that ‘I might have done the same.’Footnote 120 Indeed, during his visit to London as South African president in 1996, Mandela purportedly prostrated himself at the feet of a somewhat nonplussed queen mother in Clarence House.Footnote 121 Clearly, however crude white officials' portrayals of Africans as naively monarchical, such vignettes suggest that precolonial codes of honour and deference for indigenous dynastic history and royal genealogy meshed with imperial monarchical ideologies that also emphasized honour, propriety and virtue.Footnote 122 ‘Royal families’, declared Chief Albert Luthuli in 1934, ‘help to bring about and maintain national duty and in many respects, a high ethical standard’.Footnote 123 It is notable in this regard, too, that the avowedly modern and nationalist organ, Inkundla, regularly carried articles on the different royal lineages, particularly that of the Zulu royal family, and although foreign news received scant attention, stories on the British royal family were staple fare.Footnote 124 But there was also something about this particular royal family that inspired affection and admiration. The expressions of loyalty were highly personal, discernible in the African names given to different members of the royal family.Footnote 125 To some extent, the king needed do no more than be the descendant of ‘the Great White Queen’ to earn this warm regard, but the images associated with the royal family struck a chord with the values and gendered aspirations of the ‘respectable’ middle and working classes of the townships, and their notions of how ‘modern’ Africans should comport themselves as parents, wives, husbands, and citizens. The domestic life and the ‘ordinariness’ of a monarchy that was intimate, informal, at ease with ‘the people’ cultivated by the British media after the abdication of Edward Vlll was much commented upon in the African press. The silent, commanding paterfamilia, and the ‘feminine’ Queen and her daughters were described approvingly in a number of features on the royal family as models to be emulated.Footnote 126 Much mention was made of the fact that members of the royal family found time to visit the African spectators and to exchange pleasantries with them. In an example which was echoed in the late Princess Diana's visits to AIDS sufferers in the 1990s, Princess Elizabeth was admired for taking the trouble to greet a bus load of young African girls from a leper settlement, who were being kept a safe distance from the crowd. Like their English-language white counterparts, black journalists emphasized the royal family's activities during the war, the informality of the king's visit to troops in North Africa, the royal couple's much mythologized meetings with British families who had lost their homes during the London blitz, and especially the active part played by Princess Elizabeth in joining the women's army where she did ‘many dirty jobs’. As one journalist pointed out, ‘many Africans became lorry drivers during the war … exactly the same training as the princess. This shows that in a democracy … royalty can mingle with and do the same jobs as the ordinary person without losing dignity.’Footnote 127 Indeed, despite the deep divisions created by recruitment of African soldiers during the war and the disappointments of demobilized black servicemen, this group fervently expressed loyalty to the crown during the tour. The Bantu Ex-Servicemen's Association assured the secretary for native affairs in March 1947 that it had instructed its members to co-operate with chiefs and the authorities in welcoming the royal visitors and thereby ‘counteract some mischievous propaganda being disseminated by irresponsible politicians who have not the interests of the Bantu people at heart’.Footnote 128 The newspapers also emphasized African contributions to the war effort and how they had voluntarily aligned themselves with Britain ‘against the vast hordes of Nazism’.Footnote 129
The royal family's graciousness, apparent colour-blindness, and genuine interest in Africans were contrasted with the rigid racial etiquette of South African society. Orlando township residents expressed their joy that ‘the Royal arrangements had transcended all colour discrimination and included them’.Footnote 130 One leader writer hoped that the example of the royal family would prompt white South Africans into pondering whether they could ‘follow the royal example in our attitude and relations with other sections of the community?’Footnote 131 The good manners and courtesy displayed by the royal family were prized as a badge of civility by urban Africans – especially men and women of an older generation. One letter writer pointed out that this civility, combined with deep traditions of African hospitality were sufficient reasons for welcoming the royal family and that boycotting was ‘un-African in the extreme’.Footnote 132 These traditions could be used to explain the suspension of political activity and hostilities: ‘Good hosts allow nothing to mark the comfort and mental ease of their guests’, wrote one newspaper editor, ‘family squabbles are kept in the background; any soiled domestic linen or garments are stowed away out of sight’.Footnote 133
A final reason for this overwhelming demonstration of loyalty was probably the desire to signal a powerful rejection of the herrenvolk mentality associated with the Afrikaner nationalist movement. Even if at a subconscious level, by declaring their loyalty, Africans were distancing themselves from Afrikaner nationalist responses to the tour, which ranged from polite tolerance to open hostility. Indeed, although African intellectuals elsewhere in colonial Africa had become disenchanted with imperial monarchical culture before the war,Footnote 134 South African black nationalists were in no hurry to dispense with the rituals and pieties of king and empire. In a sense, the monarchy seemed to be all that stood between black South Africans and herrenvolkism. For black South Africans, as for white English-speakers, however, this tour was both a highpoint and the swansong of this culture of ‘loyalism’. Whereas English speakers turned inward after 1948, with a brief rallying to monarchy and Commonwealth during the 1960 republican referendum, black South Africans embraced a new politics of mass defiance in the following decade. The age of deference in African politics was finally over. Thereafter, in engaging wider international support, rather than appealing to British royalty and governments, it was to the United Nations that black South Africans brought their plaints and criticisms, making apartheid South Africa an international cause célèbre until the last years of the twentieth century.
