Abstract
On 21 January 1960, Harold Macmillan stepped off his plane at Lusaka Airport to begin a four-day tour of Northern Rhodesia. It was part of the first ever visit by a serving British prime minister to the empire in Africa. He was met by a persistent drizzle and a crowd of protestors, the latter forcing police to usher him into a car through a side exit.2 Most vocal were women from the Tonga-based Africa Nationalist Party. He never did quite escape them. They stood in pairs along the route of the cavalcade, along with other nationalist protestors, dancing and singing, whooping and waving. Placards read ‘No difference: South Africa and Federation’; ‘Give us 1 man 1 vote’.3 Amongst the airport throng had been a group of British journalists. When the band struck up ‘God Save the Queen’, Peregrine Worsthorne recalled how few Africans stood to attention or took their hands out of their pockets.4 He was Special Correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. From here on Macmillan endured a mixture of black protest and white rudeness. The following day he headed to the all-important Copperbelt region, one of the largest copper producing areas in the world. Six mines owned by two private companies, employed over seven thousand white workers as well as many thousands of Africans.5 One local newspaper reported that he was met by ‘soggy banners’ and a ‘half-hearted welcome’.6 Six Africans had lined his route from the local airport.7
Thanks are owed to the following: Dr Giacomo Macola, Prof. Ian Phimister, Dr Oliver Zimmer, Dr William Kaluso, Dr Miles Larmer; Ms Rosie Coffey and Mr Philip Rushworth for research assistance and proofreading; Mr Gary Blank; and the staff at the National Archives, Lusaka. In Livingstone: Dr Friday Mufuzi, Mr Humphrey Mwango, and Mr William Chipango, the Director of the Livingstone Museum. The AHRC generously funded this research trip. At the American Heritage Centre, Wyoming, Ms Ginny Kilander and Mr John Wagenner were extremely helpful. I benefited from presenting this paper at the History Department, Columbia University, and at the British Studies Centre, University of Texas. I thank Prof. Wm Roger Louis and Prof. Philipa Levine for their comments.
Phrase taken from the headline of newspaper article following Macmillan’s speech, Daily Telegraph, 5 February 1960. British Library Newspapers, London (henceforth abbreviated to BLN).
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Notes
See Giacomo Macola, Liberal Nationalism in Central Africa. A Biography of Harry Mwaanga Nkumbula (New York: 2010).
See I. Phimister, ‘Corporate Profit and Race in Central African Copper Mining, 1946–1958’, Business History Review, 84, 4 (2011), pp. 749–74.
See Alistair Horne, Harold Macmillan: Volume II 1957–1986 (London: 1989). Another problem may also be that Macmillan’s memoir with the title winds of change was sometimes wrongly catalogued, one enthusiastic young reader eventually tracking it down in his public library in the Climatology section. I am grateful to LSE’s Prof John Breuilly for this anecdote.
Charles Williams, Harold Macmillan (London: 2009), p. 358.
D.R. Thorpe, SUPERMAC: The Life of Harold Macmillan (London: 2010), p. 455.
Harold Macmillan, Pointing the Way, 1959–1961 (London: 1972), p. 47.
Chris Munnion, Banana Sunday: Datelines from Africa (London: 1993), p. 86.
John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge: 2010), p. 14.
See criticism of the ‘gingerly approach’ by P. Brantlinger, Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians (Cornell: 2011), p. 3.
See ‘“The Wind of Change is blowing”. . .’ in Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation (Cambridge: 2006), ch. 4, pp. 241–326.
R. Ovendale, ‘Macmillan and the Wind of Change in Africa, 1957–1960’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995) pp. 65–83; B. Phiri, ‘The Capricorn Africa Society revisited: the impact of liberalism in Zambia’s colonial history, 1949–1963’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 24, 1 (1991), pp. 65–83; and 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.
R. Shepherd, Iain Macleod: A Biography (London: 1994).
Harold Macmillan, Winds of Change, 1914–1939 (London: 1966), p. 3.
On the late colonial missionary position in this area, see John Stuart, British Missionaries and the End of Empire: East Central and Southern Africa, 1939–1964 (Michigan: 2011), ch. 4, pp. 98–129.
For example, N.J. White, ‘The Business and the Politics of Decolonisation: the British Experience in the Twentieth Century’, Economic History Review, 53, 3 (2000), pp. 544–64; A.G. Hopkins, ‘Rethinking Decolonisation’, Past and Present, 200, 1 (2008), and more generally P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction, 1914–1990 (London: 1993).
See Ian Phimister, ‘Corporate Profit and Race in Central Africa Copper Mining, 1946–1958’, Business History Review, 84, 4 (2011), pp. 749–74.
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 (Sept 2007), pp. 459–84.
Harold Macmillan, Riding the Storm, 1956–1959 (London: 1971), pp. 733–6.
Joanna Lewis ‘“Daddy wouldn’t buy me a Mau Mau”: the British popular press and the demoralisation of Empire’, in E. Odhiambo and J. Lonsdale (eds.), Mau Mau and Nationhood (Oxford: 2003), pp. 227–50; Lesley James, ‘What we put in black and white’: George Padmore and the practice of anti-imperial politics’ (unpublished PhD thesis, LSE, 2012).
Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London: 2006 edn.), p. xxvi.
For the long-term context see P. Murphy, Party Politics and Decolonisation (Oxford: 1995), and Alan Lennox Boyd: A Biography (London: 2003).
Bill Schwarz, The White Man’s World: Memories of Empire (Oxford: 2011), esp. introduction pp. 1–32 and ch. 3 ‘Remembering Race’, pp. 165–205.
Iverach Macdonald, A History of the Times, Volume V (London: 1984), pp. 276–94.
See Philip Murphy, British Documents on the End of Empire Series: Central Africa, Part 1 (London: 2007).
I. Phimister, ‘Workers in Wonderland? White Miners and the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt, 1946–1962’, South African Historical Journal, 63, 2 (2011), pp. 183–233.
Peregrine Worsthorne, Tricks of Memory: An Autobiography (London: 1993), p. 196.
See also L.J. Butler, ‘Britain, the United States and the Demise of the Central African Federation, 1959–1963’, in Kent Fedorowich and Martin Thomas (eds.), International Diplomacy and Colonial Retreat (London: 2001), pp. 131–51.
For a background to the trades union movement in Northern Rhodesia, see for example, M.R. Mwendapole, A History of the Trade Union Movement in Zambia up to 1968 (Lusaka: 1977); Parkinson B. Mwea, The African Railway Workers Union, Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (Lusaka: undated);
Kenneth P. Vickery, ‘The Rhodesia Railways African Strike of 1945, Part II: Cause, Consequence, Significance’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 25, 1 (1999), pp. 49–71;
H. Powdermaker, Copper Town: Changing Africa (New York: 1962);
J.L. Parpart, ‘The Labour Aristocracy in Africa: The Copperbelt Case 1924–1967’, African Economic History, 13 (1984), pp. 171–91; and on the role of race in mobilisation,
see C. Perrings, ‘A ‘Moment in the Proletarianisation’ of the New Middle Class: Race, Value and the Division of Labour in the Copperbelt, 1946–1966’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 6, 2 (1980), pp. 183–213.
For the West African case, see Hakam Tijani, The British Left, Nationalists and Transfer of Power in Nigeria, 1945–1965 (New York: 2006), p. 109.
John Lonsdale, ‘Anti-colonial nationalism and patriotism in sub-Saharan Africa’, ch. 16 in John Breuilly (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism (Oxford: forthcoming, 2013).
Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Language, Race and the Legacies of the British Empire’, in Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins (eds.), Black Experience and the Empire, Oxford History of the British Empire, Companion Series (Oxford: 2004), p. 391.
Richard Reid, A History of Modern Africa: 1800 to the Present (Oxford: 2009), esp. pp. 246–7.
John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (Cambridge: 2009 edn.) p. 267; pp. 251–72.
M. Larmer, Mineworkers in Zambia: Labour and Political Change in Post-Colonial Africa (London: 2007), esp. ch. 1 pp. 29–41.
I am grateful to John Lonsdale for alerting me to this quote, See ‘Churchill and the colonial empire’, ch.11 in Ronald Hyam, Understanding the British Empire (Cambridge: 2010), pp. 319–41.
Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain, 1940–2000 (London: 2003 edn.) pp. 426–39.
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Lewis, J.E. (2013). ‘White Man in a Wood Pile’: Race and the Limits of Macmillan’s Great ‘Wind of Change’ in Africa. 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_4
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