Annual Dinner 2009

Date: Tuesday 3rd of March.
Place: Cambridge Regional College, Newmarket Road campus.

Our speaker was Dr Susan Williams, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. A transcript of her speech is provided here, along with some pictures from the evening.

Pre-dinner speech

I should like to thank you very much indeed for inviting me to speak to you tonight. It’s a very great honour to be here. Looking at your website, I am hugely impressed by the range and energy of your activities. I see that you have been in existence for 14 years and I’m sure you have made life at Cambridge University a much happier and more rewarding one for many students from Commonwealth countries.

Terry’s brief to me – ‘Growing up in the Modern Commonwealth’ – has been very interesting to think about. Having grown up as a child and gone to school in Zambia, having lived as an adult in Canada for a number of years, having worked and given birth to my daughter in newly-independent Zimbabwe, and having lived in the UK at different times, I realise that it is the Commonwealth – and not any country in particular – that is the place I call my home. It is also the space where I do my work as a writer and a historian.

The year 2009, as we all know, is the 60 th anniversary of the Modern Commonwealth. Immense changes have occurred in these 60 years. One of the most important has been an end to the evil of racism and minority rule that caused such terrible suffering in 20 th century Africa. As former Secretary–General Emeka Anyaoku has said, ‘The Commonwealth can look back on that period with pride. We played a key role in the international campaign [against racism and apartheid] and in doing so provided a powerful lead to the rest of the world on a key matter of principle.’

Growing up in Zambia gave me a strong sense of the before and after, if that’s one way to put it. In my first years of life there, it was the British colony of Northern Rhodesia and part of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which was so hated by the majority population. My father was posted as a schools inspector to a place now called Chipata, in the Eastern province. We lived by the airstrip and my mother nursed in a leprosy mission. After that we moved to Chalimbana, a teacher training college. Later we went to live at Munali School for Boys, six or so miles outside Lusaka, which includes First President Dr Kenneth Kaunda among its distinguished alumni.

1964 was the year of Independence. I was one of the many children at the independence ceremony in the stadium, who showed off our newly-learnt callisthenics and belted out the new national anthem: ‘Stand and sing of Zambia, proud and free’. I’ll never forget it.

But more significantly, I was one of the thousands upon thousands of children taking part in the integration of schools. Under colonial rule, schools had been segregated and the best schooling was reserved for whites; in fact, many Zambians had no schooling at all. At Independence, pupils were enrolled regardless of colour and schools were massively increased in number and size. This coincided with my entry to secondary school – Kabulonga School for Girls in Lusaka – where my year went from a few streams of white girls to 9 that were non-racial. Racial inequalities were removed – in schools, clinics, transport services, and in the rules about where you could or could not live – or even shop. A common refrain among the whites was, ‘Standards are falling’. But for the majority of the population, standards were soaring.

But on Zambia’s southern border, in what was then called Southern Rhodesia, things were getting worse, not better – as the white minority sought to keep the land, power and wealth for themselves. In 1965, the year after Zambia’s Independence, Ian Smith went against every principle embodied in the spirit of the Modern Commonwealth and declared the Unilateral Declaration of Independence – UDI. Almost immediately for us children over the border, there was a sense of being on a war footing. It took 15 long years of war before Zimbabwe finally became free.

In 1980 I went to newly-independent Zimbabwe and lived there for two years, working for the Ministry of Health and UNICEF. I was privileged to be part of the postwar baby boom and my daughter was born in 1982 at the Mbuya Nehanda Maternity Home – named after the great heroine of the early resistance struggle.

When I first arrived, it was a great shock to discover the extent of racial segregation and inequalities. With Ministry teams I visited commercial farms where people lived in corrugated iron huts, with no running water. Harare’s new deputy secretary for mental health was shocked at the conditions she discovered for black psychiatric patients – contrasting sharply with the talking cures and drugs available to whites. Black patients were kept in huge cement-floored halls with no seating. Patients were forced to wear uniforms of blue cloth and had their heads shaved. Electroconvulsive therapy was given without anaesthetic. These things were changed at Independence. Patients were given beds, linen, blankets, pillows, clothes, underwear and shoes. There were no longer separate wards for Black and White patients. Windows were put into the outer walls and suddenly, from being dark damp holes, the wards were light and airy rooms. The doors of locked wards were opened. For the first time in years patients were able to touch the soil, grass and trees. The deputy secretary was deeply moved when she saw some women, let out of a locked ward, begin to dance.

This history needs to be remembered. I know that Zimbabwe has endured terrible difficulties over the last few years and these issues are complex. But that doesn’t change the reality of the past and of the legacy of UDI.

The triumph of justice over racism is the theme of my book Colour Bar. It is the story of Seretse Khama, who became the founding President of Botswana, which borders Zimbabwe and – by a thread – Zambia. The book begins with Seretse’s arrival in 1945 in Britain, where he had come to study law. He was the heir apparent of the Bangwato people and hoped to take badly-needed skills back home, which was then the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland. Studying in London he met and fell in love with Ruth Williams – and they married. This unleashed a dramatic and bitter chain of events, culminating in their exile in 1950 from their own country – simply because of the difference in the colour of their skin. He was black; she was white. The British were under heavy pressure from apartheid South Africa and from Southern Rhodesia, which did not like the idea of a prominent mixed marriage on their borders.  But in any case, there was little approval for the marriage in the corridors of power in London.

This is a story from which the British government emerges badly – it lied to the House of Commons, to the people of Botswana, and to the British public. But it is also a story from which Seretse and Ruth, the Batswana, and their supporters across the Commonwealth – and it really was a united Commonwealth campaign – emerge with honour. ‘We are a peace-loving people,’ Seretse Khama told a campaign meeting in Britain.  ‘Don’t let your government teach us racial prejudice.  We don’t have it.  We don’t want it.’  The people of Botswana never stopped asking for the return of Seretse and Ruth, arguing that ‘a woman of one’s choice refers equally to all colours, whether white, black, green or yellow.’ In 1956, the Khamas were finally allowed to return home with their children – a return that was welcomed with joy across the Commonwealth. In 1966, Seretse was elected as the First President of independent Botswana. His and Ruth’s eldest son, Seretse Khama Ian Khama, is the current President of Botswana.

Botswana is by any standards a success. At independence, it was listed by the UN as one of the world’s ten poorest nations. But in the first 25 years of self-rule, it had the fastest economic growth in the world. It is now a successful, peaceful, middle-income country, which enjoys regular elections and a democratic, multiparty, non-racial government.  Of course, Botswana is not perfect and one of its most serious problems is HIV/AIDS, but it has taken a lead in Africa’s efforts to tackle this scourge.

It could rest on its laurels. But it does not. I was fortunate to be in Botswana in 2006, which was its 40 th anniversary of independence. At the stadium in Gaborone, children held up large boards to build a series of images. One image showed the ballot box, to emphasise the importance of democratic rights. Another spelt out the words, Pula! Pula! Pula’ (‘Rain!’), to signify happiness and hope. The final image showed the words ‘Vision 2016’, referring to the list of social and economic goals towards which Botswana is working for its 50 th anniversary of Independence in 2016. The people of Botswana are looking to the future – not to the past.

This unqualified commitment to the future is shared by our Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma and it is highlighted in the motto of the 60 th anniversary of the Modern Commonwealth – ‘Serving the next generation’. And this, I think, is one of many ways in which some of the older members of the Commonwealth can learn from the newer ones. For in Britain, at least, there is by contrast an excessive focus on the past – on tradition, on images of past glory. While Botswana looks forward to Vision 2016 in its national celebrations, the UK looks backwards with ceremonies like ‘Trooping the Colour’, which celebrate former military triumphs.

Canada was for me a place that managed neatly to combine the past and the future into a seamless present. I lived in Montréal on several different occasions: as an undergraduate at McGill University and later as a lecturer at Concordia University, teaching Commonwealth Literature and other subjects. I never quite came to terms with the Canadian winter and looked on in horror at winter sports in weather that was well below zero. But I loved everything else about Montréal. Canada seemed to be a place of possibility: no matter what your social status or the place where you grew up, you could study hard and get a start in life. It seemed really democratic. Of course you have to speak two languages – French and English – but there are multiple opportunities to learn them.

When I first went to Canada in 1972, everyone seemed to be on the phone. Phones were everywhere: private ones in every home and public ones on every corner. I had just been living in the UK, where no one made a phone call unless it was absolutely necessary and where the whole business of inserting 10p bits to make a call was tedious and often unsuccessful. Consequently, this easy, heavy phone use made a real impression on me and that’s how I thought of Canada – very inclusive, with everyone chatting on the phone. So I’ve been very interested to read a new, marvellous book called Less Walk More Talk by Russell Southwood. It’s about the transformation of Africa by the mobile phone.

The West, explains Southwood, largely refused to invest in the mobile phone in Africa on the grounds that – this being Africa – it was bound to fail. But the industry has been built and developed by African business and has been a huge success. One African company went from a handful of people with virtually no money, to a multibillion dollar company in just seven years. This has had an astonishing effect, bringing easy communication to places with no roads, no landlines, even to places devastated by war. Mobile growth, enthuses Southwood, has been like an electric force, mobilising the emergence of a new kind of Africa.

This miraculous development – along with the internet and modern media in general – has broken down many of the barriers of distance and time that used to separate the different countries of the Commonwealth. This is an unprecedented advantage for the Commonwealth historian of the 21 st century, like myself. Undreamed-of research opportunities have been opened up, bringing unique historical evidence right onto our desks. These include images such as digitised documents and photographs, videos on sites like YouTube, newsreels, and music; new research tools include electronic archive lists and search engines.

In the case of my research for Colour Bar, my book about Botswana, for example, newsreels gave me information that was simply not available through more traditional research routes. Other unique digital resources included Miriam Makeba’s song Pula Kgosi Seretse – which she wrote in 1956 to celebrate the Khamas’ return to Africa and which became a hit song that year in the townships of Johannesburg.

In this talk I have tried to touch upon some aspects of growing up in the Modern Commonwealth. But I have just read a much better account in last month’s New African, by the journalist Cameron Duodu. He describes very movingly his own growing up – and how his dream of a non-racial Africa has, miraculously, come true. As a boy in Ghana – then the British-ruled Gold Coast – everything was decided by what he calls the ‘unseen white men’. But, bit by bit, everything changed: in 1957 Ghana became the first African country to become independent and it was swiftly followed by other African countries – even apartheid South Africa in the last decade of the 20 th century. ‘Was I dreaming or seeing reality? South Africa?’ he writes. ‘I mean I just couldn’t believe my eyes.’ Little did he envisage then the election of Barack Obama as American President in 2008. ‘A black man, fathered by a Kenyan,’ marvels Duodu, ‘was president of the USA!’

In just less than a week, on 9 March, we will be celebrating Commonwealth Day. There is much to celebrate. One of these is your marvellous organisation, which embodies perfectly the spirit of the 60 th anniversary – ‘Serving the next generation’. It would have been just the thing for Seretse Khama as a student at Oxford University in the 1940s. As I researched his student years in the UK, I felt very sorry for him when he was at Oxford. ‘I was miserable the first term,’ he recalled later of his time at Balliol College. ‘Nobody talked to me or showed any interest in me and I thought it was just another way of showing that I did not belong.’ But an organisation like yours – with people from all over the Commonwealth – would have made him feel that he really did belong – as you have made me feel today.

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