South Africa; Races and Riches, War and Union

Abstract

In South Africa it was usual to speak of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand as the foundation members of the British Commonwealth of Nations; elsewhere it was customary to include South Africa itself among their number. Historically the distinction is debatable and in any case of no great importance; conceptually South Africa’s place is with the founder-states. At almost every stage in the evolution of the Commonwealth, South Africa was notionally, if not actually, an integral part of it. Canadian confederation was at once preceded and succeeded by abortive attempts at South African federation; and the problems of race and colour, existing with peculiar intensity in the South African colonies, came to be accepted as belonging from the outset to the Commonwealth as a whole. Such problems might no longer exist in more than nominal form in respect of Red Indian survivors in Canada or of the aborigines in Australia; they did exist, but within manageable dimensions, in New Zealand with its indigenous Maori population. But long before a united South Africa became a dominion in 1910, they had their place in the thinking which brought the Commonwealth into existence. It was no chance, it was the logic of history that made first popular reaction against an imperialist war in South Africa and then popular (if in part misguided) enthusiasm for a magnanimous South African settlement the immediate precursors to the recognition by name of a Commonwealth, already thought of as being in embryonic existence.