Postscript and Conclusion

Looking at the afterlife of the 1947 Royal Visit, this concluding section argues that it was the swansong of black loyalism and the end of an age of deference in black politics in the region. Thereafter, in engaging external support, rather than appealing to the British monarch and governments, it was to international organisations such as the United Nations that black South Africans brought their discontents. The competing ideas of respect and respectability, deference, and defiance during the Royal Visit of 1947 thus had wider international resonances. The critiques and appeals to arbiters and allies abroad, moreover, foreshadowed the emergence of anti-apartheid activism in Britain and beyond. Just as the Royal Visit began, the South African Communist H.A. Naidoo denounced the visit and its excessive costs in an address to the Empire Communist Party Conference in London. So too did the South African-born doctor, Cedric Piliso, founder member of the League of Africans and Peoples of African Descent, at a meeting in Birmingham addressed by George Padmore, (Trinidadian-born activist intellectual and co-organiser of the 5th Pan African Congress in Manchester in 1945), the Labour MP and Birmingham branch chair of the India League, Julius Silverman. A petition was also sent to George Vl during the tour, asking him to proclaim that the discrimination in South Africa contradicted the desire for freedom and equality for all his subjects. It was organised by the British Student Labour Federation, signed by members of organisations ranging from the India League, the East African Students Union, and Cambridge Socialist Club and supported by Prime Minister Attlee’s sister Mary Attlee. These debates in South Africa, India, and London may well have influenced the positions taken by India at the 1949 Commonwealth conference in London that launched the ‘new Commonwealth’ and its transformation from a ‘cosy club’ of white dominions to an organisation dominated by its African and Asian member states, many of which chose a republican form of government on attaining independence. When an all-white referendum voted in November 1960 in favour of a republicanism for South Africa, it was a moment for reflection, nostalgia, regret for many black South Africans. Although it was the unvirtuous nature of the Apartheid republic that was major point of contention, the departure from the Commonwealth, and the anticipated loss of a connection to the British monarchy evoked feelings of both loss and anxiety about being cast adrift in a dangerous world. It was, in no small measure, the re-joining of the wider world that the Queen’s visit of 1995 signified, that was the cause of so much rejoicing.