Introduction: ‘The Crown Illuminates’

Introduction: The Crown Illuminates provides the reader with an overview of royal visits to Southern Africa and black loyalism as objects of study and their implications for historical knowledge. It situates British Royal Visits and Black Loyalism in Twentieth Century Southern Africa within the new cultural histories of monarchy, empire, and decolonisation and of Southern African societies. It analyses the origins and purposes of royal visits with respect to Britain’s African empire and the overlapping and competing agendas of Buckingham Palace, Whitehall, and colonial governments of the subcontinent in mounting these modern royal progresses. Informed by anthropological literature, heritage, and performance studies, it presents royal tours as forms of spectacular political theatre, ‘soft diplomacy’, ritual spaces, ‘liminal moments’, and festivals, and as offering novel means of interpreting the layered and regionally inflected expressions of black empire loyalism and monarchism, and the multiple ways in which these were inculcated and experienced.