The accusation that Britain neglected the three High Commission territories of Basutoland, Bechuanaland, and Swaziland, especially during the inter-war period, is a common one, both in standard works on the subject and in current controversies over their future. It has been alleged that an important reason for this neglect was the assumption made by successive British governments that their future status was uncertain, particularly in view of South Africa's repeated claim that the territories were geographically part of the Union, largely dependent on the latter's economy, and therefore should be transferred to South Africa's jurisdiction.1 In this article an attempt will be made to test the truth of these assertions in so far as there is evidence for a considered judgment.
A STRIKING FEATURE OF THE EMERGENCE OF THE ‘NEW’ SOUTH Africa following the first democratic election in April 1994 was the widespread expectation that both the mechanism of transition and the electoral outcome in coalition government (the Government of National Unity: GNU) might serve as a model to other African regimes similarly placed. This may well be true with respect, for example, to the relevance of power-sharing arrangements of the kind that were built into South Africa's interim constitution in 1993, but as I shall explain, South Africa's experience of constitutional change and its outcome is best understood as sui generis. I am inclined to be sceptical about this assumption on the grounds that ‘models’ imported from elsewhere have not served Africa well; that the establishment of Westminster-style democratic structures in newly independent states in the 1950s and 1960s based on winner-take-all electoral systems failed to take into account historical and cultural differences — in particular the absence of anything resembling a Western-style tradition of democratic participation. Whether it could have served as a model, given the constraints of the time — loss of imperial will, insistent claims of indigenous nationalist elites etc. — is another matter. As Michael Oakeshott remarks: ‘[democracy] has been homegrown in Western society and to seek to transfer its beliefs and habits to an exotic soil will always be difficult.’
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