We have been recalling how in 1949-50 Ruth and Seretse Khama, along with their supporters in Britain and Botswana, turned the tables on their persecutors by getting their story to the global, more especially American and Commonwealth, as well as British press.
In public relations it is a given that one must establish one’s own message from the onset, while avoiding the trap of constantly being defined by and reacting to one’s rivals and/or critics. This is what the Atlee Government failed to do in its handling of the controversy surrounding its exile of Seretse and Ruth.
Indefensible as their actions were, Atlee administration would not have been put on the defensive but for the proactive engagement of the press by Seretse’s supporters. As we have seen, key turning points in this campaign were Ruth’s decision to open herself up to Margaret Bourke-White in Serowe and Seretse’s subsequent breaking of his silence in London by holding his historic press conference in the wake of his banishment.
Of course the weakness of the Labour Government’s position was more fundamentally rooted in the moral and political bankruptcy of its own actions. It could not publicly admit that it had embraced a policy of accommodation to racialist thinking within its own Colonial establishment, as well as emanating from Pretoria and then Salisbury (Harare).
How did the UK’s first Labour Party majority government, which in terms of its domestic policy is generally considered to have the most reformist 20th century British administration, dig itself into such a hole? The answer in part lies in the fact that although they considered themselves to be genuine socialists of a sort, Prime Minister Clement Atlee along with most of his Cabinet colleagues where not anti-imperialist. In this respect they and others shared a firm belief, in the aftermath of Britain’s withdrawal from South Asia, that the Empire still had a bright new future in Africa.
The basis of the Labour Party’s post-war neo-imperialism is perhaps best captured in the writings of the great Pan-Africanist George Padmore (1902-59), including his 1949 tome on the subject: “Africa: Britain’s Third Empire.” (The book’s provocative title is derived from the by then already well established notion that British imperial history can be divided into two identifiable epochs, with her first empire having been centred around their possession of North America and the second of India, with obvious echoes of Third Reich.)
In an earlier 1944 article entitled “Imperialism: The Basis of Labour Party Crisis” Padmore had accurately predicted the any future Labour government would compromise its non-racialist principles by joining the Conservatives in a post-war embrace of South Africa as a strategic partner based on their conviction that the future prosperity of Britain and thus the British working class depended on a tightening of the economic bonds of imperialism.
In this respect Padmore was, moreover, correct in his appreciation that much of the inspiration for such an imperial revival emanated from the British, including Labour Party, elite’s embrace of ideas advocated by the then South African Prime Minister Jan Smut’s in his “Regionalism Scheme”. This connection is reflected in an April 1944 report by the Party’s National Executive, which states that:
“In regions such as Africa, South-East Asia, and the South-West Pacific, where neighbouring Colonies are administered by different Governments, we strongly recommend the early creation of Regional Councils to co-ordinate economic policy.”
Although he did not use the term, in his own analysis Padmore foresaw the potential role of the British working class, as represented through their leaders in the Trade Unions and rightwing of the Labour Party, in an emerging system of global apartheid. In his own words:
“Every working-class organization functioning in a highly-developed capitalist society like Britain with a world-wide Empire, is, willy-nilly, influenced by its imperialistic environment. It is precisely because the ideology of the ruling-class has permeated the Labour Movement and corrupted influential sections of the leadership that Trade Union leaders have become so closely tied with Monopoly-Capitalists.”
With specific reference to the Labour Executive’s embrace of Smut’s ideas of a new imperial order, Padmore further observed:
“The Labour leaders, judging from this document, stand, then, on the same side as the ultra-reactionary South African Government and the Tory Party, even though to mask their political bankruptcy they give lip-service to the interests of the Colonial people as being primary in any system of imperial rule operated by capitalists, and to the objective of Socialism. But, inasmuch as the Trade Union leaders dominate the Labour Party, it is obliged to act together with the Imperialists in carrying out their programme which it has endorsed for the Trade Union leaders regard their existence, as it does, to be bound up with the continuation of the Empire.”
To which he further added:
“So you see the way the British workers are to maintain their post-war standards is not conceived by Mr. Shinwell (then Labour Party spokesperson) in a Socialist New Order, but by investing the savings of the poor in colonial exploitation, thereby converting every working man and woman into shareholders of the Empire. In this way, the workers will have vested interests with the capitalists in seeing that the native races remain “hewers of wood and drawers of water” for the benefit of the British Herrenvolk.”
