Areas of the world that were part of the British Empire, with current British Overseas Territories underlined in red.
— Photo by RedStorm1368
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
“Make America Great Again.” Those words have been gently haunting me not because of their political-loading, but because they have been reminding me of something, like the snatches of a tune or a poem which isn’t fully remembered, but which drifts into your consciousness from time to time.
Then it came to me: It wasn’t the words, but the meaning; or, more precisely, the reasoning behind the meaning.
I grew up among the last embers of the British Empire, in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). I am often asked what it was like there.
All I can tell you is that it was like growing up in Britain, maybe in one of the nicer places in the Home Counties (those adjacent to London), but with some very African aspects and, of course, with the Africans themselves, whose land it was until Cecil John Rhodes and his British South Africa Company decided that it should be British; part of a dream that Britain would rule from Cape Town to Cairo.
Evelyn Waugh, the British author, said of Southern Rhodesia in 1937 that the settlers had a “morbid lack of curiosity” about the indigenous people. Although it was less heinous than it sounds, there was a lot of truth to that. They were there and now we were there; and it was how it was with two very different peoples on the same piece of land.
But by the 1950s, change was in the air. Britain came out of World War II less interested in its empire than it had ever been. In 1947, under the Labor government of Clement Attlee, which came to power after the wartime government of Winston Churchill, it relinquished control of the Indian subcontinent — now comprising India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
It was set to gradually withdraw from the rest of the world. The empire was to be renamed the Commonwealth and was to be a club of former possessions, often more semantically connected than united in other ways.
But the end of the empire wasn’t universally accepted, and it wasn’t accepted in the African colonies that had attracted British settlers, always referred to not as “whites” but as “Europeans.”
I can remember the mutterings and a widespread belief that the greatness that had put “Great” into the name Great Britain would return. The world map would remain with Britain's incredible holdings in Asia and Africa, colored for all time in red. People said things like the “British lion will awake, just you see.”
It was a hope that there would be a return to what were regarded as the glory days of the empire when Britain led the world militarily, politically, culturally, scientifically, and with what was deeply believed to be British exceptionalism.
That feeling, while nearly universal among colonials, wasn’t shared by the citizens back home in Britain. They differed from those in the colonies in that they were sick of war and were delighted by the social services which the Labor government had introduced, like universal healthcare, and weren’t rescinded by the second Churchill administration, which took power in 1951.
The empire was on its last legs and the declaration by Churchill in 1942, “I did not become the king’s first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire,” was long forgotten. But not in the colonies and certainly not where I was. Our fathers had served in the war and were super-patriotic.
While in Britain they were experimenting with socialism and the trade unions were amassing power, and migration from the West indies had begun changing attitudes, in the colonies, belief flourished in what might now be called a movement to make Britain great again.
In London in 1954, it got an organization, the League of Empire Loyalists, which was more warmly embraced in the dwindling empire than it was in Britain. It was founded by an extreme conservative, Arthur K. Chesterton, who had had fascist sympathies before the war.
In Britain, the league attracted some extreme right-wing Conservative members of parliament but little public support. Where I was, it was quite simply the organization that was going to Make Britain Great Again.
It fizzled after a Conservative prime minister, Harold MacMillan, put an end to dreaming of the past. He said in a speech in South Africa that “winds of change” were blowing through Africa, though most settlers still believed in the return of empire.
It took the war of independence in Rhodesia to bring home MacMillan’s message. We weren’t going to Make Britain Great Again.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he based in Rhode Island.
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