The Commonwealth: The White Leader

Though Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had worked to the end to keep South Africa “in the club,” he no longer was in any mood to pull his punches. South Africa’s racist apartheid policy, he told the House of Commons, was a “tragically misguided and perverse philosophy . . . abhorrent to the ideals towards which mankind is struggling in this century.” Because of this stain on South Africa’s honor, said Macmillan, the South African flag should “now be flown at half-mast.”

Macmillan’s plain talk must have startled South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, who arrived home from London prepared to boast about, not apologize for, leaving the Commonwealth. Verwoerd found many of his countrymen confused and uneasy. The morning of Verwoerd’s return, police made predawn raids on the homes of eight African leaders, hauling them from bed to jail; in Johannesburg white hoodlums began beating up Africans in front of the city hall.

Landing at Johannesburg, Verwoerd was greeted by a premature 21-gun salute. (Until May 31, when South Africa formally becomes a republic, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth will still technically be South Africa’s chief of state.) At the airport Verwoerd reassuringly told a crowd of 20,000 Afrikaners that what had occurred in London had actually been a South African “victory.” Obviously relieved by Macmillan’s assurances that Britain did not intend to end its preferential tariff agreements with South Africa despite the Commonwealth split, Verwoerd seemed to have changed overnight from a lifelong Anglophobe to a bright, new Anglophile. Fondling a bulldog given him by a London “admirer,” he spoke emotionally of his affection for Macmillan, explained that by leaving the Commonwealth he had actually done “our British friends” a favor by easing the pressure brought to bear on Macmillan by the Commonwealth’s African and Asian members.

Addressing his all-white Parliament in Cape Town in its chamber paneled in stinkwood, Verwoerd described his London trip as a “triumph.” and blandly suggested that Macmillan’s “strong words” against apartheid had been merely a gesture that Macmillan had been obliged to make in deference to Britain’s “quite wrong” policies in its African colonies. What seemed to rankle most was Macmillan’s line about the South African flag. Actually, cried Verwoerd. the flag would only be at half-mast if “we had chosen self-destruction and mass suicide.” As it was, with South Africa established as an internationally isolated, white-dominated island in Black Africa, “the flag flies proud and free.” Shouted the government benches: “Hoor! Hoor! [Hear! Hear!].”