Stuart Mole

Negotiating with Apartheid: The Mission of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group 1986

Abstract The 1985 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, meeting in the Bahamas, established an Eminent Persons Group to encourage dialogue towards the establishment of a non-racial and representative government in South Africa. The Group visited South Africa and met with leaders of the front-line states, government ministers and black leaders in South Africa and African National Congress leaders in exile. Its report was published as a Penguin Special in June 1986, reputedly the fastest book ever published and an immediate best-seller. The report painted a damning picture of apartheid and galvanised calls for full economic and financial sanctions. It demonstrated the distinctive strengths of the Commonwealth in world affairs.

Whose Commonwealth? Responses to Krishnan Srinivasan's The Rise, Decline and Future of the British Commonwealth

Abstract Krishnan Srinivasans provocative book The Rise, Decline and Future of the British Commonwealth is the first full-length study of the Commonwealth for some years. The Round Table invited five leading Commonwealth scholars and activisits to respond from varying perspectives. They find the book stimulating and irritating in equal measure. The debate is set to continue.

From Empire To Equality?: Migration And The Commonwealth

Migration is an ages-old well nigh global phenomenon and features prominently in the history of the British Empire and its much transformed successor the contemporary Commonwealth. Twentieth century debate about the nature and significance of migration has accompanied changing assessments of the Empire and Commonwealth, especially in the second half of the 20th century. Some crucial realities face the Commonwealth on the question of migration. Solutions, or at least improvements, must be sought by encouraging perceptions of genuine equality and of identity, even of harmonious multiple identities.

‘Seminars for statesmen’: the evolution of the Commonwealth summit

The Commonwealth was transformed by the independence of India, Pakistan and Ceylon, and now has 53 members. The Commonwealth summit has accordingly changed in size and character. The author traces the evolving character of Commonwealth summits and of the parallel events now associated with them, and suggests some ways in which they might further evolve.

Issues of commonwealth membership

Concern to regularise the criteria for membership of the Commonwealth culminated in the Harare Declaration of 1991 which sought to codify the processes of enlargement while establishing a set of principles to guide acceptable behaviour by member states, particularly in the related fields of democracy and human rights. The admission of several countries without a direct association with Britain marked a departure from the founding principles of the Commonwealth. Notwithstanding the recommendations of an Intergovernmental group on Commonwealth Membership, it is likely that heads of government will want to retain a considerable degree of flexibility when determining applications by aspiring states. In ten years’ time it is possible that the Commonwealth may have increased to some 60 member countries, raising many questions about the effect on the organisations essential characteristics and the spectre of it becoming the victim of its own success.

Apartheid 1948–1994

This is a witness and participant account that is extremely honest and harrowing—as well as hopeful. It is judgemental and forgiving. It understands that Robert Mugabe has led Zimbabwe to ruin, but also acknowledges that he brought to Zimbabwe both independence and a nationalist project. But it is also a book of indictment—not least of the liberation commander, Rex Nhongo, for his cruelty and his avaricious use of female combatants for his own satisfaction. In this book, rape is never far away. The author, kidnapped as a schoolgirl and conscripted into the guerrilla forces, one of many child soldiers, tells a story of hardship, battles, massacres, ideology, and the betrayal of those who fought. Her story rings true, not least because of the efforts made, after independence was won, to accord her some sort of education in Germany. This kind of finally desultory gesture was accorded many combatants, but not all prospered in a peace where they knew the secrets of great men. Chadoka recounts how she asked Tongogara outright, and in public, whether he had killed Herbert Chitepo. She was on familiar terms with many who are now household names in Zimbabwe. She tells her account of how she fought in the battle of Chimoio. And she describes the Lancaster House talks as ‘the politics of sycophancy’. She says that it was because ‘Mugabe’s only game plan is to die in power and flip flop any time’. But she immediately, in the next chapter, talks of the joy in a ‘people’s victory’ when Mugabe won the independence elections in early 1980. The book is hugely valuable as an eyewitness account of the travails of the independence struggle, how they were viewed and suffered by a female participant who saw up close the machinations of those who sought not only freedom but also power. But it is a contradictory book, where people are condemned in one chapter and then praised in a later chapter. In a way, the book reflects the ambivalences of the Zimbabwean struggle. What is amazing of course is how few first-person narratives there are like this one. In the officialised histories of liberation, of Chimurenga, there is often literally, black and white. To be both heroic and wicked is perhaps not so much a contradiction as a complexity which Chadoka accords our knowledge of the great men and women of Zimbabwe. All who fought are now in their autumn years. The legends spun around them do not always survive in this uneven but searingly honest book.

Nelson Mandela and the Commonwealth: A Relationship in Images

Nelson Mandela’s relationship with the Commonwealth was long lasting and defined by more than the struggle against apartheid. These images capture some of the key moments in that relationship. The portrait at the head of the section is of Mandela the Commonwealth statesman. He was photographed in Edinburgh, attending his second Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) as South Africa’s President. It was to be his last Commonwealth summit, although the 1999 Durban CHOGM was in part arranged so as to celebrate South Africa’s non-racial democracy and to fete its retiring president, as well as welcoming his erstwhile deputy, Thabo Mbeki, to the presidency and to the chairmanship of the Commonwealth. The next image in the collection reflects a period in Mandela’s earliest political involvement with the Commonwealth. The year is 1962 and Mandela is visiting London. Ostensibly, the pose is of Mandela the tourist, photographed before Westminster Abbey with another familiar landmark, the Houses of Parliament, immediately behind. But it also speaks of a time of frenetic international activity following the Sharpeville massacre of March 1960. Mandela played a prominent role in the successful campaign to force South Africa from Commonwealth membership in 1961. As repression deepened in South Africa, he eluded the authorities and sought support abroad, not least as the African National Congress prepared for armed struggle. His freedom was short lived. Captured in 1962—by then back in South Africa—the next 27 years of his life were to be spent in prison. Other photographs tell of the 1986 mission of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group to South Africa and—on three occasions during that period of shuttle diplomacy—the group’s journey to Mandela’s prison cell. They attest to the Commonwealth’s part in assisting the search for a negotiated end to apartheid and to the heightened campaign for economic and financial sanctions that eventually helped that settlement to come about. There are images of some of the leading Commonwealth figures of the period, whether Commonwealth secretaries-general or heads of government. The final photographs are a reminder of the ‘Mandela CHOGMs’ (1995 and 1997) and some of the new issues, beyond apartheid, on which he left his considerable mark.

Mandela and the Commonwealth

Few would deny the historic importance of South Africa to the Commonwealth. As an independent dominion within the association after 1931, it was a powerful ally in war, a significant trading partner and a magnet for largely white migration. Its disenfranchised and neglected non-white majority only occasionally troubled the consciences of those who had abandoned its rights in 1910, putting the interests of the union of South Africa’s then four states before the rights of the majority. The overriding pursuit of ‘fusion’—bringing the Afrikaner and English whites together and healing the deep wounds of their recent conflict—was punctuated by a steady retreat from African and Indian empowerment. In the new world that began to emerge from the ashes of the Second World War, far-reaching changes had begun to shake the old ‘imperial’ Commonwealth and herald its eventual transformation into a modern, multiracial international organisation. Even as that process was beginning, the early signs of conflict over race were apparent. Jan Smuts, South Africa’s victorious leader in war and author of the preamble to the charter of the new United Nations, encountered early opposition from the UN—and India in particular—over South Africa’s treatment of Indians in Natal and its desire to annex the mandated territory of South-West Africa.1 The question of racial (and political) equality became central for the ‘new’ Commonwealth, with its rapidly burgeoning African, Asian, Caribbean, and Pacific membership. Its approach to racism in Southern Africa—specifically manifest in the white settler rebellion in Rhodesia and in the system of apartheid in South Africa—became the touchstone of its sincerity and credibility as a multiracial organisation. At the same time, the UK’s deep-seated economic interests in South Africa and its perceptions of its security interests (Dubow, 2017, p. 295)—across the African continent and in the sea lanes bounding it—was the source of repeated friction with its Commonwealth partners. This deep-rooted British ambivalence over South Africa haunted the rest of the Commonwealth and dogged the organisation’s long struggle against apartheid. While these issues form the bedrock of any understanding of the relationship between the UK, South Africa, and the Commonwealth, they are not the primary concern of this special issue. This is not the place to tell the story of the Commonwealth’s engagement with apartheid and South Africa, nor to attempt an assessment of the Commonwealth’s contribution to the international campaign which helped bring about apartheid’s demise. Nevertheless, the fourth anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s death is a fitting moment to re-visit this relationship for various reasons. First, there have been a number of recent publications which are either sceptical of the Commonwealth’s role in helping end apartheid or present only a partial account of what the association would see as one of its principal achievements. Second, twenty-three years since apartheid’s demise there is now little evidence in South Africa’s public memory of any recognition of the Commonwealth’s contribution to the struggle, other than within a post-colonial and post-imperial framework. Third, the Commonwealth itself is facing a period of challenge and change, as both a united, values-based organisation and one offering global relevance and leadership.

Out of Malta, Beginning Anew

Abstract The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) held in Malta witnessed high drama in the election of Patricia Scotland as the organisation’s new Secretary-General. This article notes, among other things, that it once again demonstrated the myth that the Secretary-General is chosen on the basis of consensus. In the view of the author, although the conference discussed a number of issues of substance and importance, there is an urgent need to give the Secretariat new collective purpose and vision. Malta, argues the article, provided an important point of departure, and the next CHOGM, to be held in Britain in 2018, offers Commonwealth organisations and civil society an opportunity to make their own unique and enhanced contributions.

Ramphal on Record/The Record on Ramphal: A Review Article

It is incumbent on Commonwealth Secretary-Generals to write their memoirs. Arnold Smith set the trend in 1981 with Stitches in Time: The Commonwealth in World Politics. Emeka Anyaoku followed up with The Inside Story of the Modern Commonwealth (2004) and Don Mackinnon with In the Ring: A Commonwealth Memoir (2013). Yet the second Secretary General procrastinated. ‘For at least twenty years’, he writes, ‘relatives and friends, among them, scholars, have been asking me, then insistently urging, about “memoirs”. My answer invariably was that I had not lived my life for a diary and had no plans for memoirs. I could have added that I had not truly retired; the story was not ended; it was not time to look back’. Eventually in 2011 he concluded that it was his duty, if not exactly his joy. The resulting volume is attractive with its endpapers—an 1840 print of mountains in Guiana and the Robert Batchelor painting of Marlborough House from Carlton Gardens —and many photos, mostly from the author’s own collection. Even if closer examination reveals a few typos, it is good to find so much for such a reasonable price (£17.99 for a fat hardback). Fortunately, Ramphal had already deposited his archives, organised and accessible at the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies. Readers may be tempted to skip over the acknowledgements but should not do so as these give an overview of the resources and memories, personal and archival, on which Ramphal was able to draw. He has structured the book thematically, more than chronologically, but he has a strong sense of the past, particularly his own Caribbean/South American heritage as also of the present and the future. In this review article three members of The Round Table offer differing perspectives on this important book. Terry Barringer