This chapter considers how and in what contexts the reasonable person standard was applied by the selected colonial courts of the British Empire. The key question is whether the reasonable person imported from England remained English in substance – whether it continued to resemble a man on the Clapham omnibus – or the courts tailored the standard to the specific circumstances before them. As the first section shows, there are many cases in which the reasonable person was equated with an Englishman. This suggests that the standard was static in nature. However, the second section of the chapter complicates this conclusion by introducing numerous cases and settings in which the standard was adapted to specific, local contexts – sometimes so successfully that local variants of it developed. Drawing together the first two sections, the final part considers the nexus between a standard’s resemblance to the people to whom it is applied and the authority of law.

Among the core tenets of Britain’s much-vaunted ‘global reach’ was the belief in a shared tradition of British justice inherited from the Common Law. Though administered by way of separate judicial systems in widely disparate jurisdictions, the law nevertheless furnished a potent symbol of continuity through the force of shared judicial principles and procedures, joint-channels of appeal and a common source of legitimacy in the British Crown. In Rhodesia in the 1960s, this system was turned on its head when the increasingly isolated community of white settlers led by Ian Smith embarked on a Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Legal axioms that could no longer be relied on to underwrite white authority were swiftly discarded in favour of a much cruder conception of ‘law and order’ founded on naked force. The long arm of British justice was caught embarrassingly short when the Wilson government failed to supress a rebellion of a few hundred thousand unrepentant white Rhodesians, whose agitation stemmed from the realization that they could no longer be British in their own terms. This chapter looks specifically at the furore over the Smith Government’s use of capital pubnishment against political prisoners, which came to symbolize broken allegiances and the eclipse of the common law as the sheet anchor of a global British justice.

Chapter 5 looks at Amnesty’s development in the mid-1960s, and in particular the major crisis that engulfed the organisation in 1966-1967 over its involvement in the crises in Aden and Rhodesia. The chapter opens with an overview of the crisis, which resulted in the departure of Peter Benenson. Two key aspects are then explored in detail; first, Amnesty’s relations with the British state, in particular the secretive Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, and, secondly, Peter Benenson’s long-standing engagement with the problems of southern Africa. It is argued that the crisis was due, in part, to Benenson’s attempt to devise new mechanisms for non-governmental intervention. The chapter concludes with an account of the drive to reform and professionalise Amnesty under the leadership of Martin Ennals.

Lieutenant Jim Truscott, a 23-year-old officer from the Royal Australian Engineers, vividly recalled his introduction to his task of monitoring the activities of the Rhodesian Security Forces (RSF). The day after their arrival in Salisbury, he and Sergeant Peter King were deployed by British helicopter. ‘The pilot was positively nervous as he furtively looked for low-strung wires’, but Truscott and King were blissfully ignorant of the danger and enjoyed the ride until they found themselves ‘dumped in a paddock beside the little country town of Marandellas’. There was nothing more they could do but squat on their packs and wait until the Rhodesian unit they were responsible for monitoring arrived about an hour later. In the meantime, they mused as to whether they should load their weapons, despite orders to the contrary. When they were finally picked up, the vehicles practised their counter-ambush drills just before leaving the town. As Truscott wrote: ‘We simply looked at each other and our magazines never left our weapons for the next two months.’

Like most of the other conflicts dealt with in this volume, that in Southern Rhodesia resulted from the process of decolonisation. Unlike Kashmir, Palestine and Cyprus, where the conflict was over control of a recently decolonised territory, in Southern Rhodesia (as in Indonesia in the 1940s) the conflict was between, on the one hand, a majority population seeking independence and, on the other, colonial masters determined to hang on at all costs. The situation differed from that in Indonesia in that the original colonising power, Britain, had more or less withdrawn from the situation, and for a decade and a half the colonialist fight had been carried on by the white minority they had left behind. But the similarities were strong, too.

‘The past week has marked one of the most difficult and potentially dangerous phases of the settlement in Rhodesia. Great forbearance – the more difficult after years of war – was called for from all sides.’ With these words, the interim Governor, Christopher Soames, opened a broadcast to the nation on the evening of 6 January 1980. In somewhat florid language, he continued by describing progress so far in dramatic terms as three acts: the withdrawal of the Rhodesian Security Forces (RSF); the dispersal of members of the Commonwealth Monitoring Force (CMF) ‘in small isolated groups scattered among the hills and in the middle of the veldt’; and finally the arrival at the Rendezvous Points and Assembly Places (APs), ‘in a trickle which has become a flood’, of thousands of members of the Patriotic Front (PF).

On Christmas Eve, 1979, five young Australians shaved in the sea on a beach in Mauritius, in the calm dawn after a cyclone had trashed the island. They were members of the 150-strong Australian contingent on its way to Southern Rhodesia as part of the Commonwealth Monitoring Force (CMF). In Rhodesia they were to monitor a ceasefire at the end of a long and often brutal civil war, in preparation for elections that would lead to genuine majority rule for the first time in the country’s history. Nobody knew what awaited them in Rhodesia. They arrived at Mauritius, their last stopover en route, to find much of the area devastated and hotels rendered uninhabitable. Resourcefully they found other accommodation, washed in creeks and shaved in the ocean before flying on. It was all an adventure, but it could have seemed like an ill-omened prelude to a mission full of uncertainty.