Hail to the King! But make the Commonwealth better for Africa

The exit of Queen Elizabeth II and the entry of King Charles III have thrown Africa’s relations with the British monarchy into a state of flux.

The British monarch rests on three powers:  the patriarch of the House of Windsor (the British royal family and the world’s most influential dynasty), the head of state of the United Kingdom and its overseas territories and Crown Dependencies, and the figurehead of the Commonwealth of Nations.

Since the British empire finally lost its hold on Africa, the continent’s stakes in this edifice of power are limited to the Commonwealth.

As the third head of the Commonwealth, after his grandfather, King George VI, and mother, King Charles has to gird up his loins, hold together, expand and transform the organisation. Inversely, the grouping risks dying out as a relic of a bygone colonial age.

The Commonwealth was already cut and dried by the time Elizabeth ascended to the British throne in February 1952.  In 1926, Britain and its dominions agreed on an organisation of “free and equal” members “united by a common allegiance to the Crown”.

Statute of Westminster

 The organisation was officially established in 1931 by the Statute of Westminster. Ahead of India becoming a Republic in 1949, the Crown was redefined as “the symbol of the free association”.

The Queen took to heart the “Wind of Change” speech by the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, on February 3, 1960.

She transformed the empire “upon which the sun never set” to the Commonwealth.

During her 70-year reign, she signed the handover papers of some 40 colonial dependencies around the world, 18 of them in Africa.

At the twilight of the British Empire, Ghana, Africa’s first country to ascend to independence in 1957, led the continent in joining the Commonwealth.  Thirteen other newly independent African countries followed suit in the 1960s.

Envisioning the Commonwealth as the House of Windsor writ large, the British matriarch defined the club as “a family of nations” where “people come together to talk, to exchange ideas and to develop common goals”.

By September 8, 2022, when Queen Elizabeth II exited, the Commonwealth was potentially the world’s largest market, with 56 countries and about 2.5 billion people out of 7.9 billion globally, more than 60 per cent of them under 29 years. Today, 21 out of 56 members are from Africa.  These countries are home to more than 626 million people, nearly a half of Africa’s 1.3 billion people.

Elizabeth made the Commonwealth attractive.

Between 1995 and 2022, one former Portuguese colony (Mozambique) and three former French colonies (Rwanda, Gabon and Togo) had joined the organisation, turning it into a multi-lingual multi-cultural grouping.

Juggling the triple power of the British monarch with finesse, Britain’s longest reigning monarch held the group together through charisma, sustained diplomatic charm offensive and energy.

The most-travelled monarch in British history, Elizabeth II visited at least 117 countries in her lifetime, more than 20 of them in Africa.

Diplomatic charm offensive

A well-thought-out diplomatic charm offensive won the hearts and minds of Africa’s most influential leaders.

She named Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah to the Queen’s Privy Council in 1959.

Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta reportedly received the prestigious Knighthood of the Order of St John in March 1972.

The monarch knighted Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe as an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in 1994, later revoked by the British Government in 2008.

And Nelson Mandela was named a Knight of St John by the Duke of Gloucester in November 2004 and received the Canadian version of the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012.

Despite her charm offensive, the commonwealth is losing its moral shine.

The Queen never formally apologised for Britain’s role in slavery and colonial brutality. 

The role of the British royal family in slavery has come under sharp focus amid growing demands for reparations.  Her death has given fresh impetus to republican movements in 14 countries where the British monarch is still the head of state.

Barbados cut ties with the British monarchy on November 30, 2021.

Jamaica’s hunger for sovereignty is palpable and Antigua and Barbuda is gearing for a referendum on becoming a republic by 2024.

Africa, too, is experiencing blips of anti-royalist sentiments. 

Anger over ongoing sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe have stoked anti-royalist sentiments. 

South Africa has renamed the city of Port Elizabeth as Gqeberha.

And Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe has been rebranded as Mosi-oa-Tunya (Shona for: the smoke that thunders).

But policy shifts are likely to make the Commonwealth attractive.  King Charles and the younger generation of royals are openly confronting Britain’s ugly legacy of slavery and colonialism. 

In Kenya,  dubbed “Britain’s Gulag”, victims of atrocities during the Mau Mau freedom struggle sued for compensation in 2011.

A British court ultimately awarded them £19.9 million, which was to be shared among more than 5,000 claimants.  As Prince of Wales, King Charles has also been outspoken on politics.

In October 2018, the new monarch spoke out publicly against the so-called Windrush scandal, the wrongful deportation of British residents of colour who have been living in the UK for over half a century. 

In Barbados in November 2021, King Charles acknowledged “the appalling atrocity of slavery” which “forever stains our history”.

 In June 2022 during the Kigali Commonwealth summit, Charles went as far as apologising for the role the British Empire had played in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, describing it as a stain in the “British history”.

Earlier this year, Charles strongly criticised plans by Prime Minister Boris Johnson to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda. 

 While visiting Jamaica in March 2022, Prince William expressed “profound sorrow” for slavery.

Human rights code

In the face of deepening poverty, under-development and the vagaries of climate change, the Commonwealth needs more than just Charter, a summit once every two years, Commonwealth Games every four years and a human rights code to be attractive to Africa. 

After Brexit, the club must put trade and development at the centre of British-Africa relations.

The Commonwealth needs a strategy for regional groupings such as the East African Community (EAC) as a future framework partnership for Africa’s development.

A “green monarch”, signified by King Charles’s manifest passion for the environment, can be a catalyst for confronting climate change as an existential threat to humanity.

Prof Kagwanja is a former Government Adviser and currently Chief Executive of Africa Policy Institute and Adjunct Scholar at the University of Nairobi and the National Defence University –Kenya.