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In South Africa, Michael explores how the lure of riches led Britain into barbaric wars and dividing the country along racial lines, with devastating consequences.
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00:01A century ago, Britain ruled over a quarter of the planet.
00:07In this series, I will go in search of Britain's imperial past.
00:13I have found gold.
00:15And uncover its legacies.
00:19How did a small island on the edge of Europe end up dominating the world?
00:25He turned a miserable group of accountants into swashbuckling pirates.
00:32From its proudest achievements to its most shameful failures.
00:37We're ripped away from Mother Africa into a strange land.
00:42And how has the history of empire transformed Britain?
00:46We became the black people of Britain.
00:49On this journey, I uncover the extraordinary story of the biggest empire that the world has ever seen.
01:02In this program, I'm going to explore how the lure of Africa's wealth threw the empire into a shameful war.
01:10Here, surviving more than a hundred years, original barbed wire.
01:16And a century of racial oppression.
01:21Followed by the rise of Africa's most famous revolutionary.
01:25I met Mandela once when he was here in London, visiting as president of South Africa.
01:32Sat with Her Majesty the Queen, two heads of state, lunching together on level terms.
01:39And I thought, what an achievement by a man who was imprisoned for much of his adult life.
01:44Having fought for equal rights for black South Africans.
01:48How did the immoral system of apartheid emerge from the colonization of Africa?
01:54The idea of subordinating black people and making them into a vassal class does not start after 1948.
02:02At what part did the British Empire play in its creation?
02:12Zulu. A day that made history.
02:20I was 11 years old when I went to the cinema to see Zulu.
02:25When a hundred gallant men were outnumbered by the mightiest warrior nation on earth.
02:30And it provided for me my image of the British Empire.
02:33You're all going to die!
02:35A boy's own story of young white men in their red tunics and pith helmets.
02:42Boldly resisting an onslaught with overwhelming odds by African natives who were depicted as the aggressors.
02:55Afrika was the last great frontier for Europe's empire builders.
03:00A dark continent, forbidding and dangerous, that nonetheless promised enormous riches to those who dared to penetrate its vast uncharted
03:11wilderness.
03:11The cliché that I grew up with hides a far more complex story.
03:18The scramble for control over Africa would face the British Empire with its biggest challenge.
03:26Whose consequences would shape South Africa, Britain and the Empire.
03:33Within 50 years of arriving in Southern Africa, the British had seized land controlled by the Dutch.
03:40And established two new colonies.
03:43Cape Colony, on the southern tip.
03:45And the colony of Natal, which the British annexed in 1843.
03:51This is its capital, Pietermaritzburg, in KwaZulu-Natal.
03:56And here the footprint of empire is plain to see.
04:00The great survivor.
04:03The great survivor.
04:03I had not expected to find the Queen Empress Victoria still here.
04:07Her statue untoppled, ungraffitied.
04:10But also, I noticed, uncleaned.
04:13The grand civic buildings reminiscent of Manchester or Glasgow.
04:18And even the common post box stand as reminders of how the British constructed a familiar world in an alien
04:26terrain.
04:37But why would British men and women want to travel across the world to Southern Africa?
04:44Dr. Trevor Nguane is from the University of Johannesburg.
04:48This is a 19th century map.
04:51And it's titled, The Colonizability of Africa.
04:56What is really amazing is, yeah, where they're talking about which parts of Africa are easier to colonize and what
05:07should the colonizer look out for.
05:09What factors are important in the ease of colonization?
05:14They were worried about health conditions, tropical disease like malaria.
05:20So they say, you know, if you go there, you're going at your own peril.
05:24But also the friendliness or not of the natives.
05:30So they would say things like, don't go there, they are warlike.
05:33All of this territory was considered to be freely available to European powers.
05:39Yeah, I think they just thought it was their, I don't know, divine right to take over Africa.
05:46On paper, Southern Africa might have looked unusually hospitable to the colonists, but its land was already home to a
05:55large indigenous population.
05:58How the white settlers proceeded to overpower the black population, seizing land and power, is central to South Africa's imperial
06:08history.
06:10The garrison at Fort Napier, established by the British when they seized Natal, overlooks Pietermaritzburg.
06:18Troops were stationed here during some of the most notorious wars in African history.
06:34That sort of song would have been sung in battle?
06:37Not necessarily in battle, but it would be sung as the soldiers are drilling.
06:43Umboso Koza's ancestor led 20,000 Zulu warriors against imperial troops at Izandluana.
06:56As the British cutters swayed across Southern Africa, the indigenous population fought to protect its lands.
07:03The wars fought by the Zulu kingdom have become celebrated legend.
07:09The Zulus have passed into British history as being very brave and very fierce.
07:15Yes.
07:15But would you say also that they were peace loving?
07:17I would really say we were peaceful until we got provoked.
07:22The challenge was the mission.
07:24The mission was to colonize.
07:27I think the leaders, they thought they were going to just like having a walk on the park because they
07:32had guns.
07:34Only to find that these guys were really prepared to die for their land.
07:39The thing that they were fighting for was the future of their heritage and their culture.
07:46The political and military strength of the Zulu people blocked the expansion of Britain's colonies in Southern Africa.
07:56In 1879, imperial forces massed on its border, primed to invade.
08:05But within days, a British force sent into Zulu territory was overwhelmed at Izandluana as 20,000 Zulu warriors countered
08:17the threat.
08:23You can imagine 20,000 regiments singing in unison.
08:36They all step on one path.
08:40It's like they could count, like bars, one, two, three, four, and like intimidating the regiments from Britain.
08:48And as they were getting closer and starting to shoot, they were already finished.
08:53So Zulus with weapons like these?
08:56Yes.
08:57The British with these.
08:58Tell me about this weapon.
08:59This one is Martin Henry.
09:01It was able to kill at least five people per bullet.
09:05Tell me then, how are the Zulus able to fight with this against this?
09:11I think it was a matter of understanding first the methods of the British army.
09:17Because these were taking one bullet.
09:20So you can imagine the commander says,
09:22Fire!
09:23And then,
09:24And then they say, seize fire.
09:26And then they're taking like different positions in the other row.
09:30As they're busy doing that, the Zulus would be faster finishing them.
09:37The Zulus were ready to die for their land.
09:42But indigenous Africans could not prevail.
09:46And there would be a new wave of settlers who uncovered the extraordinary wealth of Africa deep in its soil.
09:53I have found gold.
10:05Early British settlers saw southern Africa as a vast and alien land that needed their civilizing influence.
10:15After Natal became a colony, the British established a governor in this fine house.
10:20He was, of course, responsible to the Queen's ministers in London.
10:24But at a time when messages could take months to arrive, urgent matters were often settled locally.
10:35The governor's first task was to seed the colony with British settlers who would manage the land and its population.
10:44Among those who seized the opportunity were ancestors of Robert King.
10:50When did your family arrive in South Africa?
10:53On the 10th of October, 1849.
10:55And who was that?
10:56That was my great-great-grandparents, John and Janet King, and Janet's sisters, and a bachelor brother, James Ellis.
11:07Any idea how arduous their journey was?
11:10It was a terrible journey out.
11:11It lasted three months.
11:13And they came out in an old whaler that leaked the whole way.
11:20For many people in Britain, facing high levels of unemployment and poverty at home,
11:26migration to the colonies offered a new life and the chance to prosper.
11:31What was the attraction of Africa, do you think?
11:34Well, it was the burn emigration scheme and the fact that things in Europe were not good
11:39with the revolutions and the potato blight.
11:44And he had the chance here of a chunk of land?
11:46Yes, and improving and making himself independent.
11:54Robert's family came to Natal with the help of a scheme set up in 1849 by Joseph Byrne,
12:01a speculator who promised passage to this new world and cheap land.
12:07But they were to discover that his promises were overblown.
12:11To quote from James King's memoirs,
12:14We were dumped on the felt one afternoon in May 1850.
12:18The weather was fine but cold and the only covering overhead was a large waterproof tarpaulin set up on poles.
12:27The farm was quite unimproved and it was the edge of civilization as far as Natal was concerned.
12:35Joseph Byrne thought he would make a successful profit out of it.
12:39Of course, it turned out to be a failure.
12:42What was your family's view of Joseph Byrne and his scheme?
12:46Oh, they certainly thought he was a swindler.
12:48They were allocated 20 acres, which was insufficient for farming here in Southern Africa.
12:54And it's also an issue when you think that this wasn't empty land that was taken over.
13:02It was, in many senses, stolen from the indigenous people.
13:07How was it during the 19th century that a small white minority was able to govern a large black majority?
13:13They had guns. The way they eventually controlled them politically was another matter altogether.
13:22Natal as a British colony recognized that everyone had the right to the vote.
13:27However, you had to have a certain amount of income and the other thing to be able to read and
13:34write English.
13:36In Natal, it meant that very few Africans got the vote.
13:48Britain, in its home policy, didn't have to deal with the color of skins.
13:52So, the rights of the races, how and where they lived, were decided here.
14:03As the number of migrants increased and the colony expanded,
14:09the white minority devised rules to control and subdue the black majority.
14:15They were corralled in native reserves and employed in jobs that no white man wanted.
14:27There are some 200 so-called mountains like this,
14:31made not of gold dust, but dust from gold mines.
14:36They represent 150 years of spoil, still scarring the landscape today.
14:45Millions of tons of dirt were ripped from the earth during the sinking of vast mines like this.
15:02Well, it was a bright day at the surface, but we descend into the damp, murky depths,
15:08and going down just about 75 metres.
15:10Some guys had to go down 3,000 metres to find their gold.
15:19With its diamonds and gold, Southern Africa was a place where fortunes could be made,
15:26by those willing to risk everything.
15:29Now, the business part of the mine.
15:34Every day, each shaft of this mine received 3,000 men going down on the morning shift.
15:41There were 15 shafts, 45,000 men working this mine alone.
15:47And they came to conditions like this.
15:49The gold is always at an angle from north to south.
15:55They carve into it and they push that week by week, month by month in that direction.
16:02The face where they worked, no more than a metre high.
16:05So they were bent double or lying on their back to work,
16:08with the constant threat that the roof might tumble in,
16:11might crush a hand or a leg and put them out of work.
16:19Hundreds and thousands of black workers toiling in gold mines enabled a handful of white men
16:26to become the richest people in Southern Africa,
16:29and among the wealthiest in the empire.
16:35One was Cecil Rhodes, who at the age of 17 was sent to work on his brother's cotton farm in
16:42Natal.
16:43His ascent to wealth was spectacular.
16:47And he shaped not just Southern Africa, but the British Empire across the continent.
16:53In 1887, a year after gold was discovered, Cecil Rhodes chose this site for the Rand Club.
17:01It was to exhibit all the elegance and exclusivity that a British gentleman would expect
17:07wherever he might find himself in the world.
17:11Rhodes had grown cotton in Natal, made a fortune in diamonds,
17:16and now he turned his attention to gold.
17:20Here in Johannesburg, the most powerful and wealthy men did deals
17:24and redrew the map of British Africa.
17:27Brian McKenzie is chairman of the Rand Club's House Committee.
17:33What a very splendid building it is.
17:35Thank you very much.
17:36Tell me about its design.
17:37So the inspiration for the club was taken from the Reform Club in London,
17:41and the idea really being that it's a piece of London in the sort of dry, dusty, upstart Transvaal.
17:48I hear this expression, the Rand Lords. What does it mean?
17:52It's really the wealthy mining magnates at the founding of Johannesburg.
17:56And these people had incredible, lavish lifestyles.
18:00So just how exclusive was the Rand Club in its early days?
18:03It was terribly exclusive.
18:05To become a member, you had to be proposed and seconded.
18:08And once you had been proposed and seconded, your name would then go onto a list,
18:12and the list would be put up at the front of the clubhouse,
18:16and there were black balls next to your name.
18:19And if your name got, I think, three black balls, you weren't allowed to become a member.
18:23What kind of qualifications do you think you needed?
18:26Was this about pedigree? Was it about money? Was it about ethics?
18:30Joburg was an upstart town, so I think money was really the thing that spoke.
18:37Almost overnight, Southern Africa's wealth was in the hands of an unlikely collection of men.
18:44Let's start with Cecil Rhodes. We know about his wealth and power.
18:48He started as a sickly young man from Bishop Stortford, who came out here for reasons of health.
18:55His main business partner was Charles Rudd, another rather sickly youth.
19:00Although in his days at Cambridge, he was quite a useful sportsman.
19:04Perhaps the most surprising, a Jewish cockney boy, Barney Bernato.
19:10He had at one time made his living as a prize fighter and as a juggler, but he had real
19:15business acumen.
19:17Here's Solly Joel, son of a publican, but once described as the richest young man in Britain.
19:24He put his money into racehorses and bought the Drury Lane Theatre.
19:28And finally, John Dale Lace. He was born in the Isle of Man, said to be the most handsome member
19:35of the club and the best dressed.
19:37And what became of his wealth? Well, his wife took milk baths in a marble tub.
19:43Gold had given the Randlords absolute power over the empire's southern African colonies.
19:52By contrast with having wealth in the United Kingdom, for example, at that time in southern Africa, you not only
19:59had the money, but you had control of human beings.
20:01It was quite shocking control. Rhodes was in the diamond diggings in Kimberley, and he was asked when he looked
20:07over the diggings, did he see money, did he see wealth?
20:11And his response was he saw power. And, you know, Rhodes really had this vision that he wanted to paint
20:17Africa in British red.
20:19So you would have this vast tract of red all the way from Cape to Cairo and really expand the
20:25British Empire, which I think was something that was a very popular view at the turn of the century.
20:35A few millionaires wielded extraordinary financial and political power and most significantly controlled a vast number of people.
20:47The black population that had stood in the way of colonial expansion was harnessed to work for the white bosses.
20:55But how could so few rule so many?
21:04Dr. Trevor Nguane is a specialist in workers' rights.
21:09I would say that no one wanted to come to the mines.
21:13There was brutality, there was violence, there was racism, but many men found that in order to survive, they were
21:21to supplement their livelihood with coming to the mines.
21:25And what kind of wages might they expect here, do you think?
21:28Very low wages. The mine owners pushed a very hard button.
21:34Were there any opportunities for self-improvement amongst the miners?
21:38Well, there was a rigid race colour bar. So certain jobs were out of bounds for black workers.
21:46And even if the mine owners wanted to promote black workers, they had a problem because the white workers felt
21:57threatened by black workers.
21:59But in any case, keeping black workers without any career options cheapened their labour. So the mine owners preferred that.
22:12Gold had secured Britain's imperial might over people and land.
22:18But imperial greed would cause appalling damage to British prestige.
22:27On the eve of the 20th century, Britain's hunger for gold triggered one of the bloodiest and most expensive conflicts
22:35in the history of the empire.
22:37Embroiling British forces in a demoralising guerrilla war.
22:42I wouldn't call it murderous, but I would call it callous.
22:54The empire's expansion across southern Africa was a highly profitable business.
23:01Gold and diamonds created enormous wealth.
23:04But in the end, there was a cost.
23:09Buildings like this, scattered across the South African landscape, are the legacy of a bloody war sparked by the empire's
23:17greed.
23:21So, hands and knees anyway to get in.
23:27Immediately I'm struck by the thickness of the walls.
23:30They really are tremendous.
23:32These places must have been hugely expensive to build.
23:35And they took an average of three months.
23:38Normally these block houses had a machine gun emplacement.
23:41I don't see any sign of one here.
23:43But certainly lots of slits where riflemen could be positioned standing on ladders.
23:49And here I perceive the reason why the block house was built in this position.
23:54It was to overlook the railway.
23:56Tremendously important to the British to control these tracks.
24:05As early British colonists had advanced across southern Africa, descendants of the original Dutch settlers, known as Boers, had retreated
24:14inland and settled to self-governing republics.
24:19They couldn't know that they had chosen some of the most valuable land in Africa.
24:28To understand how decades of hostility between the British and the Boers escalated into a bloody war, in which more
24:35than 70,000 men, women and children died, I'm talking to historian Roger Webster.
24:43Take me a picture of the Boer. The word means farmer.
24:47Farmer, yes.
24:48The average farmer read one book and that was the Bible.
24:53Okay. And he took that literally.
24:56And he believed that God had given him the land to live off.
24:59And that's how he lived.
25:01They didn't like the British one iota.
25:04They found them untrustworthy.
25:06And, in some words, they were.
25:08Because, you know, whether one likes it or not, if you look at history, they were the spin doctors of
25:13the world.
25:14Thinking now about the South African war, why does the Boer leader Kruger declare war on the British?
25:20Because he was fully aware of the fact that Britain wanted to invade.
25:26And the reason why he knew it is he watched what the British did in Zululand in 1879 at Islandoana
25:34and Yulundi.
25:35They wanted the war.
25:37Okay. Why? Because they wanted Zululand.
25:40And that's exactly how it was engineered.
25:43Now, they did exactly the same to Kruger.
25:46They amassed forces on his border.
25:48And Kruger says, if you do not withdraw your troops within 10 days, I'm going to declare war.
25:55And this is what he does.
25:56And Chamberlain stands up in Parliament in Britain and waves the telegram and says,
26:01Gentlemen, we've done it.
26:03We've made them go to war.
26:06So that was all planned beforehand.
26:09To get fingers on the gold.
26:17In 1899, when the South African war, as it's now known, began, the British felt confident of swift victory.
26:26After all, the Boers were farmers, not military men, and were not expected to fight back effectively.
26:36How do you think the Boers fighting against the British were able to hold out for so long?
26:41Well, firstly, being a farmer, they were expert marksmen.
26:46Secondly, they were expert horsemen, and they knew the country.
26:53Whereas the British didn't.
26:55They were aware of the terrain, but they didn't know all the nooks and crannies and where to duck and
27:01where to hide.
27:02Because you'd get situations, particularly in a terrain like this, where they'd just disappear.
27:09Because they knew exactly where to go.
27:14With the arrival of reinforcements, British commanders believed victory was in their sights.
27:21But their traditional military skills were of little use against the tactics deployed by the Boers.
27:27The British found themselves mired in a guerrilla war.
27:33Are the South Africans fighting on because of gold?
27:37Yes. The wealth of the country.
27:40And those are the richest gold mines that the world's ever seen.
27:45As guerrilla attacks continued month after month, the British built more than 8,000 block houses, spread over 3,500
27:54miles to fence in and eliminate the Boer commandos.
27:58The British High Commissioner said, why don't we build lines of block houses to hem these Boers in and use
28:07the barbed wire.
28:08And what they would do is they would roll out the barbed wire and put cans and bills on them.
28:13So that if anybody interfered with it, they could hear it in the block house.
28:18You have to imagine this block house and many others, connected by hundreds of miles of barbed wire, serving to
28:26enclose thousands of Boers so they couldn't get out and cause trouble for the British.
28:31And here are the cement footings of the posts that held the barbed wire.
28:38And here, surviving more than 100 years, original barbed wire.
28:43Throughout the conflict, with every assault against them, the Boers' defiance grew and they refused to surrender.
28:53The response was to burn the farms and round up the population, men, women and children, reviving an old military
29:02tactic of scorched earth and developing a modern one of the concentration camp.
29:11For centuries, military strategists had scorched the earth to destroy crops, homes and infrastructure which the enemy could use to
29:21survive.
29:22Under Lord Kitchener, the British set out to break Boer resistance.
29:26Nearly 30,000 homesteads were razed to the ground.
29:32The fields were torched and livestock slaughtered as troops cleared the land of Boer and black African civilians.
29:42The war then became one of the most shaming episodes in British history.
29:50Here at Heidelberg, near Johannesburg, the British built concentration camps, mainly for women and children, a few men and black
29:59Africans.
30:01A hundred such camps appeared across the country.
30:04The scorched earth policy was brutal, but Britain's neglect of its prisoners was far more deadly.
30:14In 1900, the British began to round up and transport Boer and black civilians to camps, where they would live
30:23in appalling conditions, behind barbed wire.
30:29This cemetery records the tragedy that unfolded in the concentration camps.
30:35Historian Dr Lindy Kortz has studied how the empire applied this inhumane policy.
30:45Camps were at first established for men who were called the so-called hensuppers, or the hands uppers, people who
30:51had surrendered, and their families.
30:53But then as the scorched earth policy comes about, you have destitute families whose farms have been destroyed, and they
30:59then join these camps.
31:01And then as the countryside is swept, the numbers grow.
31:05The numbers grow to what?
31:07Close to 100,000 people in the end.
31:09And in what sorts of condition?
31:13Terrible.
31:14Here you have a Boer family in one of their tents.
31:19And what I find very striking is the mother. Look at her face.
31:22Yes.
31:23Very gaunt, very strained.
31:25But you also see the strain on the children.
31:27By the time they had reached the camps, they had witnessed things that one would not want a child to
31:32witness.
31:33Many of them had witnessed battles.
31:36Because in the early phases of the war, many of the Boers actually took their wives and children with them
31:40on commando to protect them from the British.
31:42So these children witnessed the battles.
31:44They witnessed the violence of their homes being burnt.
31:47So that trauma stayed with many of them.
31:50The amount of babies who died from dehydration, from heat exhaustion, from being kept on open cattle trucks, open wagons,
31:59in extreme heat, to arrive at these camps and there's nothing for them.
32:03Is this then, in your view, a murderous policy or an incompetent policy?
32:07I wouldn't call it murderous, but I would call it callous.
32:11Kitchener, it was well known, was no friend of women at all.
32:14So their pleas for their conditions and their children's conditions, that fell on deaf ears.
32:22Forty-five such camps were erected for Boer civilians and a further sixty-six for black Africans.
32:31Polluted water, hunger, infectious diseases and exposure to the elements all contributed to the horrifying death toll in the camps.
32:43I imagine that the atrocities of empire were committed because the colonists had unfettered power over people that they regarded
32:51as inferior,
32:52because they were very far from the scrutiny of those who might hold them to account.
32:57Back home, a British sense of decency had been less corrupted by imperialism.
33:02If the British Empire had a conscience that could be pricked, it was to be found there.
33:09A Cornish suffragette and pacifist, Emily Hobhouse, heard of these concentration camps.
33:16Concerned by the plight of the imprisoned families, she travelled to South Africa.
33:24She wrote,
33:25Thousands physically unfit are kept in conditions of life, but they have not the strength to endure.
33:38Since the outset of the war, Hobhouse had campaigned for a peaceful settlement.
33:44Now her mission turned to improving conditions for the thousands of Boer women and children in the British camps.
33:53Emily Hobhouse exposed what was going on in South Africa to the British public.
33:59And her exposing it was actually an enormous embarrassment to the British government.
34:05But they had this investigated.
34:07And that led to measures being taken to improve the conditions in the camps.
34:12And from there on the mortality rate actually began dropping.
34:19The changes implemented because of Hobhouse saved white lives.
34:25Though still nearly 28,000 Boers died during internment.
34:30More than 15,000 black Africans also died in the camps.
34:39What has been the legacy for the Afrikaner people of all of this?
34:43In terms of our political legacy, this, like nothing else, was an impetus to Afrikaner nationalism.
34:52And one of the most horrific policies of discrimination in the 20th century.
34:56To what extent were those horrendous policies, we're referring to apartheid, based on a legacy from the British Empire?
35:04It was a continuation of a colonial order.
35:07I would take it as far back as the Dutch actually.
35:10But then the British come along and they add further segregationist measures to that.
35:15So it's a policy on which everyone was, they were all building on this, they were all contributing to this.
35:24The war was ruinously expensive for the British, but the bigger cost was to the reputation of the British Empire.
35:31It struggled over years to beat small, irregular forces.
35:36And the tactics used to win horrify public opinion at home and abroad.
35:43The South Africans, having been so badly treated, won a sort of moral victory alongside their military defeat.
35:50Now, when it came to sitting down to devise the Union of South Africa a few years later, they, and
35:57not the British, held the high ground.
36:04For decades, British rule in Southern Africa had relied on white domination.
36:09But as the new century dawned, racial division would undermine the Empire's legitimacy in bitter struggles that have left their
36:17mark on South Africa today.
36:30Late one night in June 1893, an Indian lawyer, newly arrived in Natal, was travelling by train from Durban on
36:38behalf of a client.
36:40Shortly before the train pulled into Pietermaritzburg, his ticket was checked.
36:45Even as the holder of a first-class ticket, with his brown face, he was ordered to move to third
36:52-class.
36:53When he refused, this British subject, a London-trained barrister, was thrown off.
36:59His name was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, one day to become Mahatma Gandhi.
37:10Stung with indignation, having been hurled from the train, Gandhi came to the telegraph office and sent cables to his
37:17friends and to the railway company.
37:19They were probably the first words of many millions that he would write during 21 years in South Africa.
37:30The abolition of slavery in the 1830s triggered a labour shortage across Europe's colonies.
37:38But within the British Empire, armies of workers could be moved from one colony to another.
37:43Thousands of Indians flocked to Natal to work as indentured labourers on its sugar plantations.
37:51This migration, which Gandhi witnessed, would create further racial complexity and tension in Southern Africa.
38:00And a political challenge to the Empire, which crossed continents.
38:05David Gengen is from the Gandhi Memorial Committee.
38:11When Gandhi is being thrown off the train, what's going through his mind?
38:16He felt that everybody who's a British citizen should enjoy the same rights wherever they were in the world.
38:23And he found when he came to South Africa that that was not happening.
38:27Legislation was then being passed to restrict the movement of Indians.
38:32In fact, there were certain territories in South Africa where Indian people couldn't even reside.
38:36This is interesting. Already there are restrictions on Indians as to where they live and how they can work.
38:42Decades and decades before apartheid.
38:46British control of Southern Africa relied on white power over black.
38:51The newly arrived Indian population was slotted into a racial hierarchy between the whites and blacks as second-class citizens.
39:02Even a highly educated British subject like Gandhi would be judged by his colour rather than his qualifications.
39:10What did Gandhi decide to do?
39:12He began to organise people.
39:14In 1894, he established the first formal political formation in South Africa, which was an Italian congress, which was a
39:24precursor to the African National Congress, the ruling party today.
39:27So, people then had had a forum in which to protest some of the actions that actually happened.
39:36This is interesting because he's a British subject, he's a middle-class figure, he's well off, and he's working on
39:43behalf of Indians, people of Indian heritage living in South Africa.
39:47Does he care much about the black people?
39:50Yeah, that's a very interesting question because he came obviously to fight a particular case, right?
39:57The cause was mainly around the Indian issues.
40:00But in his later writings, I mean, he made this point that because South Africa was part of the British
40:09colony, that the indigenous African population had the same rights as British citizens.
40:17Today, racism is almost universally condemned.
40:22But at the end of the 19th century, in many societies, racial hierarchies were taken for granted.
40:29It wasn't just Europeans who had this idea that they were ethnically superior.
40:35The moral standards of today are completely different from those of history.
40:42Gandhi believed that the British Empire had betrayed its colonial subjects by making them unequal.
40:49His act of defiance didn't sweep away the divisions that had become entrenched under colonial rule, but it did help
40:56to lay the foundations for a revolutionary movement.
40:59In 1948, the all-white government formalized decades of social and political segregation in the laws of apartheid.
41:10It would not be dismantled until Nelson Mandela and the ANC led the majority population to replace white rule.
41:19Was apartheid the inevitable result of the British presence in Southern Africa?
41:25Professor Nyasha Umboti from the University of Johannesburg has a very clear view that they are linked.
41:34The apartheid originates in the British Empire.
41:37The idea of subordinating black people and making them into a vassal class does not start after 1948.
41:46The Zulus, who have been defeated, who have been dispossessed, they say let's put them into reserves.
41:54Let's put them into locations where they can become a reserve of labour for white farms, for white mining areas
42:01and so on.
42:02And they are supposed to live in those reserves.
42:05Was there a moment where there could have been a liberal democracy established?
42:09Was the moment 1910? Was the moment missed then?
42:12Could we have a liberal democracy in 1910? Absolutely not.
42:15Because black people were in the majority easily outnumbering white people.
42:19So in a democracy, if you are going to give all of them the vote, then they were going to
42:23be in power.
42:24So how could you then make those people part of a constitutional or liberal democracy?
42:28That would have been very inconvenient to the system that was being set up.
42:34If this is the funeral of the British Empire and you are asked to write the epitaph, what do you
42:39say?
42:40I would say good riddance, but the scars are still with us.
42:46They are in our minds, they are in our hearts, they are in our psyche.
42:51South Africa right now is the most unequal society in the world.
42:54One in two South Africans are living in poverty right now.
42:58There is 30 million out of a population of 60 million.
43:02And generations will still have to deal with this monster that is the empire.
43:14The apartheid museum records decades of legally enshrined racism and segregation.
43:21Apartheid did not happen overnight.
43:24It built on, consolidated and perfected practices established under British colonial rule.
43:31Indeed, from the moment the settlers first arrived.
43:35That is a distressing and humbling thought if you are British, indeed if you are white.
43:41The people I have met here have shown me that the country's history is being reconsidered.
43:47To include African perspectives excluded until now.
43:52I found myself learning a lot about South Africa's past, and indeed painfully about that of my own country.
44:02In the next program, how the dream of a new England was swept away by the greatest rebellion in British
44:09history.
44:10We wanted to be as British as you guys.
44:12How dangerous was this activity for the spies?
44:15You paid with your life.
44:16And how a new vision of empire rose from the ashes.
44:19This country was built on the backs of these children.
44:23And Portillo's empire journey continues next Friday at 9.
44:27She was a royal fashion icon who even upstaged the supermodels of her day.
44:32Princess Margaret, rebel without a crown, is brand new tomorrow at 9.30.
44:36Next, remembering a peerless whirlwind of comic genius, Ken Dodd, in his own words, is after the break.
44:46This history...
44:48June ofunto, I findDAY
44:48It's a real nature.
44:48I am befrianing this to the entire time.
44:51If it is over an Indian surrounded each other, you can account myonneries or any indigenous or你 by Miyaz
44:52There are many pilots who you may contact and send our their own words for camlining afraid.
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