Macmillan's 'Wind of Change'

On 3 February 1960 British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told South Africa's parliament in Cape Town that 'the wind of change is blowing through this continent' and that national consciousness was a political fact. The speech signaled that Britain would not resist African nationalism and implicitly criticized apartheid.

Behind it lay several pressures: the 1959 Hola killings in Kenya and a report describing Nyasaland as a 'police state' had embarrassed the government, the costs of colonial conflicts were rising, and Britain wanted good relations with newly independent states and the United States. Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod, appointed in 1959, sped up transfers.

Within a few years most British African colonies became independent: Nigeria in 1960, Sierra Leone and Tanganyika in 1961, Uganda in 1962, Kenya in 1963, and Malawi and Zambia in 1964. White South Africans reacted angrily; weeks later police killed 69 protesters at Sharpeville, and in 1961 South Africa left the Commonwealth.