Expansion
In the years that followed, the Commonwealth expanded rapidly, as more and more former colonial territories achieved independence. But as the Commonwealth grew, it was to face a fundamental challenge to its integrity as a multi-racial organisation and to the reality of its new-found independence. The issue was racism, particularly in Southern Africa, and what should be the proper response of the Commonwealth, with two events in particular thrusting it into the spotlight.
Firstly, on 21 March 1960 in South Africa (then in the process of constructing ‘Grand Apartheid’), 56 Africans were shot dead and 162 wounded after a peaceful protest outside a police station at Sharpeville in the Transvaal. The incident was greeted with near-universal revulsion and condemnation and led, a year later, to South Africa’s effective expulsion from the organisation at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Meeting of 1961.
Secondly, a few years later, on November 11 1965, the then British Colony of Rhodesia, under its newly-elected Rhodesia Front Premier, Ian Smith, issued its Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI). In defiance of the United Kingdom and world opinion, for the next 15 years 220,000 whites sought to maintain their dominance over the country’s 4 million blacks, precipitating a protracted struggle in which 150,000 Zimbabweans died.
As the former colonial power, the policies of the United Kingdom in relation to both apartheid South Africa and to Rhodesia were to come under critical scrutiny. Disagreement within the Commonwealth was at times acute: whether over the desire to see the UK respond militarily to the Rhodesian rebellion; whether over the UK’s continuing commercial and military links with South Africa, and the question of the resumption of British arms sales; or on the question of economic sanctions against the apartheid regime.
For African Commonwealth countries in particular, these matters were a litmus test of Britain’s commitment to racial equality, and fundamental to the future of an association whose cornerstone was a rejection of racism and inequality.
