While we are on the subject of the racism by members of the British royal family, it is absolutely necessary to recall what happened when its crème de la crème visited the Bechuanaland Protectorate in 1947. To use a Buckingham Palace euphemism, reflections may vary but most will agree that pictures from that visit drip with blatant racism.
At the invitation of General Jan Smuts, the South African Prime Minister, King George visited South Africa and used the opportunity to stop over at the Southern African dominions of Southern Rhodesia, Swaziland, Basutoland and the Bechuanaland Protectorate. The royal party arrived in Cape Town by battleship cruiser, the HMS Vanguard, then the largest, fastest and newest battleship cruiser, and carried a staff complement (officers and crew) of 1975 men.
South African Railways provided three sets of trains (the Royal Train, Pilot Train and Ghost Train), the Garratt locomotives of which were painted deep royal blue. The royal party travelled in the White Train; the Pilot Train ran 30 minutes in front of the White Train and carried lesser officials, press officials and servants; and the Ghost Train followed the White Train carrying spare parts and maintenance gear.
During the first leg of its South African tour, the royal family travelled by train up to Pretoria from where it flew to Salisbury (today’s Harare), and thereafter toured a country then called Southern Rhodesia by train. On April 17, the train left Salisbury for “Lobatsi” in the Bechuanaland Protectorate. In preparation of this visit, the colonial administration had built a seven-kilometre stretch of tarred road (the first in the Protectorate) from the railway station to the Legislative Council where the day’s events were held. Two senior Dikgosi, Bangwaketse’s Bathoen Gaseitsiwe, and Bangwato Regent, Tshekedi Khama, showed up at the event wearing British military uniform.
Pictures of this event show the racism of the time: whites are depicted in positions of power while blacks are in those of subservience. It is reasonable to assume that like blacks, white residents also lined up the route of the royal motorcade to welcome the family but all the pictures show that much of that work was done by blacks. On the other hand, there was certainly no labour-sharing when it came to performing some menial duties. In one picture, the king inspects a guard of honour presented to royalty by recently returned members of the African Auxiliary Pioneer Corps. In another, Princess Elizabeth inspects four Herero young women clad in Victorian dresses.
Perhaps the most interesting picture is one in which the royal family interacts with the crowd which, but for a single black police officer standing to attention, is lily-white. On the whole, the crowd was mostly racially segregated and the latter picture shows that the royal couple interacted with whites only. And there is more than ample pictorial evidence that there was not a single black face in the dais – this being despite the fact that two Batswana royals were also attending the event.
Some would point the finger of blame at the organisers (the white colonial administrators) but they knew what the royal family wanted and everything had been arranged in such manner as to meet such expectations. Days earlier in Cape Town, the king had himself used the opportunity of his reply to the address of welcome to hurl racist insults at black people in southern Africa.
“It was here, at the foot of Table Mountain, that the door of southern Africa was first opened,” he said, adding that it was from the Cape that “civilization was first carried into the vast, dark stretches of the hinterland.”
With this dark history, the last thing the former Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage wanted to say was that he British Royal Family has “done more for people of colour” than anyone in history.
“The queen and the royal family have spent the last 70 years touring around the commonwealth,” he told an American news channel called Newsmax last Thursday. “The vast majority of those people are black and Asian.”
Racism against blacks was put on full display when the queen (then Princess Elizabeth) and the royal family visited Bechuanaland in 1947. To his point: members of the South African Police spent 81 years (1913 to 1994) touring around townships where the vast majority of the people were black.
The racism of British royal family came under sharp focus this past week following revelations by Meghan Markle, its first black senior member that she was subjected to racism. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey that aired on a major American TV network, Meghan retailed what appears to be a more than credible second-hand account about how a senior member of the royal family that she didn’t name, wondered out loud what shade of black her son would be. The statement was made to her husband, Prince Harry, who later confirmed to Oprah that he was “a bit surprised” by the statement. Meghan was pregnant at the time.
However, there is really nothing surprising about members of the British royal family being racist because it embodies the values of a racist society. British tabloids went to town on Meghan when it was first announced that she was marrying into the royal family, with the reportage being not about her as an individual but the race that she identifies with. The Daily Mail said that she was “almost straight outta Compton” – a play on the title of a movie about a pioneering gangstap rap group (NWA) that was formed in crime-infested Compton, a city in a Los Angeles county. In the interview, Meghan told Oprah that the racist abuse that she had to endure, most if from the tabloid media that was fed information by palace sources, almost forced her to commit suicide. A former editor of the Sun, Britain’s largest tabloid, explained the editorial approach of this journalism to CNN: “I think the way that she is reported is done in a manner which makes her look bad because people want that.”
Ironically, Buckingham Palace responded to racism with more racism. It is investigating Meghan for allegedly bullying staff but has never once investigated allegations that one of Queen Elizabeth’s sons (the one who represented her at Botswana’s BOT50 celebrations) is a pedophile who slakes his lust on underage girls.
In Bechuanaland, the British introduced a system of racism that has endured to this day. Tragically, it is only apartheid South Africa that the world thinks of when racism in this part of the world is mentioned. The reality is that the British institutionalized racism in most of the SADC countries. The historical record abounds with examples.
Cumberland Hotel in Lobatse was the first multi-racial hospitality establishment in Botswana. Before his death, the late trade unionist and Palapye kgosi, Klaas Motshidisi, recalled to Sunday Standard that in the late 1950s, one door of the Mahalapye post office was marked “Whites Only.” As Senior Education Officer with a master’s degree, future Minister of Education, Gaositwe Chiepe, was paid less than a white junior who didn’t have a university degree. Facilities at the Bechuanaland Protectorate headquarters in Mahikeng were segregated and when they relocated to “Gaberones” head of independence, Notwane Club was established to welcome all races. In his memoirs, Gobe Matenge, one of the people who started the Club, recalls an encounter with the wife of a colonial government official who didn’t want to receive a copy of a telegram from him lest their hands touched. She ordered him to get a stick, cleave one end into two, wedge the telegram in the cleft, then – holding the other end, reach over to her with the other to deliver the telegram “in such way that she could receive it without our hands touching!” In 1966, a colonial officer who designed a national flag that symbolized racial harmony was actually living in a whites-only area.
