(Reviewer: David Saks, Vol. 74, No. 1, Pesach 2019)
One of the many poignant and symbolically resonant incidents recorded in this excellent account of the 1947 Royal Visit to South Africa occurs on page 151, where it is related how at the end of the ceremony arranged for representatives of the Zulu nation to welcome the Royal Family a chieftain was heard to call out, “Do not forget us when you go away”. The date was 19 March 1947, approximately half-way through the visit to the Union of South Africa of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth and their two daughters, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. Tens of thousands of Zulus had gathered in Eshowe for the occasion to demonstrate their loyalty to the sovereign head of the British Empire, nominal as their status as subjects of that Empire had become by then. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that it was irrelevant whether or not the Royal visitors remembered their hosts, since South Africa was destined shortly thereafter to strike out in a direction very far removed from the world of King and Empire that in 1947 was still so dominant an influence. Moreover, little as anyone suspected it at the time, the British Empire itself was on the verge of dissolution, a process that would begin just a few months hence when India gained its independence and which would be all but completed a mere fifteen or so years later.
At the time of Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to South Africa in March 1995, this reviewer was working at MuseumAfrica, and was tasked with curating a small exhibition on the previous Royal Visit of February-April 1947. The project was straight-forward enough, entailing little more than gathering together a representative selection of the commemorative material produced during that time – brooches, badges and other such bric-a-brac. It was the first (and quite possibly the last) time that these items had been temporarily liberated from storage for display purposes. While on a modest scale, the exhibition nevertheless provided a tangible reminder of the importance of the Royal connection to a sizable proportion of the South African population. In addition to those who were themselves of British origin, they included a surprising number of black and Indian South Africans and a substantial majority of the Jewish community.
As its aptly-chosen title indicates, The Last Hurrah is about the end of an era, specifically of an era in South Africa but in a broader context, on the international stage as well. The 1947 Royal Visit was indeed “the last hurrah” for avid supporters of the Imperial connection, even if by the late 1940s, those ties were more symbolic and sentimental than of any legal or practical significance. Little more than a year later, South Africa would be in the hands of hardline Afrikaner nationalists who desired both to sever ties altogether with Great Britain and, more significantly, implement a system of political and social control that would, they believed, permanently entrench white minority domination in the country. The first object at least was achieved on 31 May 1961 with the establishment of a republic, South Africa’s enforced withdrawal from the Commonwealth having already taken place shortly before that.
A frikaner nationalists were not the only ones taking a dim view of the Royal Visit. By the late 1940s, Black resistance to the myriad racially discriminatory laws that even before the 1948 National Party electoral victory were already firmly in place was starting to gain genuine momentum after decades of being largely ineffectual. At its December 1946 conference, an increasingly assertive African National Congress adopted a resolution “to devise ways and means likely to bring about the abstention of the Africans from participation in the welcoming of the Royal Family” during the upcoming tour. In the end, however, people on the ground tended to ignore these calls, turning out in their many thousands to demonstrate their support at events held throughout the country. Boycott calls by the South African Indian Congress proved to be just as ineffectual.
What was the attitude of the Jewish community to the visit? Normally, this would not really be a question since overwhelmingly, Jews living within the Empire tended to be extremely loyal to it, not least because by and large they could count on receiving fair and equal treatment of a kind still distinctly lacking in many parts of the world. Of South African Jews back then, Viney writes, “Ready and indeed keen to assimilate (though not in matters religious), they rapidly adopted an increasingly English identity, and more and more lived like their fellow neighbours of English descent. …Accents were ironed out; mannerisms and styles of dress were subtly altered” (p204). By 1947, however, Britain’s progressively more hostile and obstructive approach to the Jewish national struggle in Mandatory Palestine had generated much anti-British feeling in the community. The previous year, this had taken the form of mass protest marches, at one of which Chief Rabbi Louis Rabinowitz had famously thrown to the ground the British army medals he had received for his recent wartime services. What actually transpired was a decision, adopted by the leadership and rank and file alike, to make a distinction between opposition to certain policies of the British government and loyalty to the Crown as a whole. Here, Viney quotes the South African Jewish Times of 2 May 1947, which stated that it was “testimony to the fact that whatever may be Jewish grievances against the British administration in Palestine, these do not derogate from the bonds of friendship between Jewry and the British people as such, and the loyalty and the loyalty of the Jews throughout the Empire to the British Crown”.
In his thoughtful, meticulously researched study of what until now has been a largely forgotten episode in modern South African history, Viney looks not only at the actual events of the Royal Visit – the innumerable f lag-waving receptions, solemn speeches, messages of welcome, presentations, official banquets and other such formal occasions that took place throughout South Africa – but more importantly at how the attitudes to the visit of different parts of the population were ref lective of the broader political concerns and tensions of the day. The reader has always to bear in mind that the government of that time was still the United Party, essentially a partnership between English and politically more moderate Afrikaans speakers of the kind that had dominated South African politics since unification. Few anticipated that the opposition National Party, with its focus on the furthering of specifically Afrikaner ethnic interests and vision for entrenching white minority rule through a comprehensive programme of racial segregation known as ‘Apartheid’, would come into office barely a year later, let alone that it would go on to exercise a stranglehold on South African politics for the next four decades and more. The irony at the heart of this book is that even as those committed to maintaining the primacy of the Anglo-Imperial connection were celebrating the Royal Visit, seeing it no doubt as an impressive show of strength that boded well for the future, in reality they were on the cusp of losing power altogether and being forever relegated to the side-lines.
The Last Hurrah: South Africa and the Royal Tour of 1947 by Graham Viney, Jonathan Ball, 2018, 386pp, index, photographs
David Saks is Associate Director of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies and Editor of Jewish Affairs.
