7 - The Wind Changes: Human Rights after Smuts

Summary

South Africa furnishes one of the most complex examples of the eclipse of Greater Britain, on account of the sheer diversity of peoples and political forces that shaped events in the post-war era. English South Africans experienced a period of prolonged disorientation as their paradigmatic status dwindled, caught between an Afrikaner majority determined to override their totems of British loyalty, and a burgeoning Black resistance calling time on the bogus liberties invested in the British Crown. In the decades after 1945, a uniquely opportune climate for humanitarian and anti-colonial claim-making was forged — not least for the empire’s First Peoples. All over the world, settler communities were confronted with insistent demands to redress the injustices flowing from the pioneering intrusions of their forebears, challenging their foundational myths and raising nagging questions about their security of tenure. For the minority of white, professedly ‘liberal’, English-speaking South Africans, bent on combatting Afrikaner political dominance, the advent of Indigenous demands rooted in universal rights would ultimately pose the more severe test to their British affinities and allegiances.