Imperialist Legacy

...Indeed, more than one European power of democratic pretensions has lately come to recognize the reality a mere glance at the map confirms: Southern Africa is a geographically cohesive and economically viable region whose existing political structure is unlikely to be soon changed by anything short of a global war...

...The cases of South Africa and Rhodesia demonstrate the difference between an imperial caste that reigns from afar and one that actually has its home in the colony...

...Economic empires remain, of course, though recurrent dollar crises betray their essential instability...

...Despite moralistic condemnations by the white powers, and noisy but insubstantial threats from the black countries of liberated Africa, this corner of the world has continued on its path of racialism and minority oppression with sang-froid...

...author, "Canada and the Canadians" THE POLITICAL wonder of the mid-20th century has been the disappearance of most of the great colonial empires...

...Of the four political units of southern Africa, two—Angola and Mozambique—are possessions of the world's oldest and most durable empire, that of Portugal...

...Scramble for Africa details the chain of events that began with the arrival of the first whites—the Portuguese—and culminated in the Boer war, a dismal and discreditable tragedy provoked by Rhodes and his allies in the British government...

...Southern Africa as we know it today emerged out of the clash of apparently irreconcilable forces...

...Because of this peculiar situation, rather like that of Moghul India, the strongest remnants of 19th-century imperialism survive in southern Africa...

...Similarly, it was personal ambition rather than patriotism that inspired Rhodes himself...

...Nonetheless, the traditions of Rhodes?who hoodwinked the radical imperialist Joseph Chamberlain into supporting his plans for a private empire in Africa—have survived in the country of Rhodesia that bears his name...

...Germany's occupation of Southwest Africa complicated matters until 1914...

...It was the expulsion of the last vestige of British power by the late 1960s...

...Political imperialism, however, has become restricted to the Soviet Union and China...

...No one who reads the complex history of racial conflicts presented in Scramble for Africa will come away feeling that it is a problem to be solved easily or quickly, or without bloodshed...

...The others are politically autonomous: The imperialism practiced in South Africa and Rhodesia is strictly internal—the control of black majorities by white minorities...

...When empires collapse, the will of the subject peoples is often not as important as the decay of the imperialists' will to rule...

...The other was the obstinate determination of the Dutch in South Africa to retain their racial and cultural integrity...

...They are the largest surviving examples of old-fashioned exploitative imperial rule, administered from the distant metropolis...

...Nutting's account virtually ends with the declarations of war between Britain and the Boer republics in 1899, but he clearly shows how decisively the situation in South Africa today was foreshadowed by what occurred there before the turn of the century...

...In fact, many of them desired an independent republic ruled by expatriate British...

...even the Portuguese colonies, ramshackle and neglected enclaves as they were, played a part in frustrating imperial designs...

...They are supported in this by Portugal, which in obstinately clinging to the remnants of its past empire has proved how difficult it is for even the most inefficient imperialism to be destroyed merely by insurrection...

...One was Britain's urge to dominate the continent, a cause championed by that marred and ruthless political genius, Cecil Rhodes...

...After World War II, it was easy for the British to lose interest in countries that most of them had never seen...

...In recent years, the two white South African traditions have been reconciled...

...Nutting points out, too, that the British Uitlanders whose grievances in the Transvaal provided an excuse for the war hardly shared Chamberlain's understanding of imperialism...

...The long sequence of confrontations in South Africa between Dutch and British, as well as between Bantus and whites, is treated thoroughly here...

...The stakes were much greater for the local governing classes in South Africa and Rhodesia, where sizable white populations competed politically and economically with large numbers of blacks...

...The British settlers who run Rhodesia, and the Boers who have imposed on South Africa a modernized version of the reaction-ism of old flat-earther Paul Kruger, are united in their determination to hold the region against the worldwide movement toward racial equality...

...only after French ambitions on the Niger and the Nile were countered could Britain move freely to acquire the Dutch republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State...

...Moreover, Nutting's knowledge of the inner workings of the British government has enabled him to reconstruct from official documents a highly convincing, if at times fantastic, picture of the many-sided conflict that resulted in the Boer war...

...Nutting tells of all this with an authority and a feeling enhanced by having witnessed from close quarters the last international incident incited by British imperialism: The Suez crisis of 1956 led to his resignation from Anthony Eden's government and his departure from politics...

...Exhibiting a stubbornness paralleled in intensity only by the French in Canada, the Boers defied both the British and the native Bantus, who were competing for the same lands...

...Although this phenomenon is not explicitly discussed in Scramble for Africa, Anthony Nutting provides all the relevant historical background...

...to the rocks and islands that are the last unfreeable remnants of the British Empire, on which once "the sun never set...

...and to the reactionary regimes that control the lower third of Africa...

...The end result, of course, was not the defeat of the Boers...

...The British and the French, the Dutch and the Belgians, the Japanese and the Italians and the Americans—all have abandoned or been deprived of the dominions they possessed at the end of the 1930s...

...They were motivated by what they could gain in land, gold or diamonds, not by any mystique of loyalty to England...

...During the last decades of the 19th century, European powers sought to absorb the ancient native realms of Africa into overseas empires primarily for political prestige rather than economic advantage...

...It was the final withdrawal of the British from South Africa that made the peculiar durability of local imperialism clearly evident...