Crosswinds and Countercurrents: Macmillan’s Africa in the ‘Long View’ of Decolonization

Abstract

Harold Macmillan himself never, it would seem, reflected on the implications of the now long-hackneyed metaphor by which his Cape Town speech soon became known. That is very understandable, since although the phrase might not yet have been quite the cliché which it became thereafter, in February 1960 it was already far from fresh. Stanley Baldwin in 1934 had spoken of ‘a wind of nationalism and freedom blowing round the world’.1 Macmillan himself had used the same phrase, indeed made much of the same speech, nearly a month earlier in Accra, Ghana: on this first airing it had attracted very little notice. After Cape Town, however, Macmillan’s metaphor soon became and has remained a near-ubiquitous common currency of reference to decolonization in general and to a great deal else — albeit most often misquoted, with the original singular wind routinely pluralised. It has been applied to a vast range of phenomena, especially but far from only African ones. To pluck out one resonant example from many, Helen Epstein’s book The Invisible Cure refers to HIV’s spread ‘blown by the winds of change’ in Africa.2 The inversion of Macmillan’s message, albeit not seemingly intended by Epstein, is horribly poignant: winds that once bore national liberation now carry deadly disease. Its echoes could be heard across popular culture as well as political rhetoric, from the young Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowing in the Wind’ or slightly later ‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows’ (a line which inspired and gave the name for one of America’s wilder 1960s urban terrorist groups), to the 1990 song ‘Wind of Change’ by Klaus Meine and the Scorpions, which became a kind of retrospective anthem for the end of European Communism and Fall of the Berlin Wall.