Wind of Change (speech)

The "Wind of Change" speech was a historically significant address made by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to the Parliament of South Africa, on 3 February 1960 in Cape Town. He had spent a month in Africa visiting a number of what were then British colonies. The speech signalled clearly that the Conservative-led British Government intended to grant independence to many of these territories, which indeed happened subsequently, with most of the British possessions in Africa becoming independent nations in the 1960s. The Labour governments of 1945–51 had started a process of decolonisation but this policy had been halted by the Conservative governments from 1951 onwards.

The speech acquired its name from a now-famous quotation embedded in it. Macmillan said:

The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

The occasion was in fact the second time on which Macmillan had given this speech: he was repeating an address already made in Accra, Ghana (formerly the British colony of the Gold Coast) on 10 January 1960. This time it received press attention, at least partly because of the stony reception that greeted it.

Macmillan's Cape Town speech also made it clear that Macmillan included South Africa in his comments and indicated a shift in British policy in regard to Apartheid with Macmillan saying:

As a fellow member of the Commonwealth it is our earnest desire to give South Africa our support and encouragement, but I hope you won't mind my saying frankly that there are some aspects of your policies which make it impossible for us to do this without being false to our own deep convictions about the political destinies of free men to which in our own territories we are trying to give effect.

Harold Macmillan was the Conservative prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1957 to 1963. He presided over a time of prosperity and the easing of Cold War tensions. The dissolution of the British Empire was quite rapid in comparison to others in history, such as the Roman and Ottoman Empires. At the time of the collapse the Empire embodied the direct rule of foreign territories as an integral part of a supra-national enterprise, called the British Empire. Britain, as the colonizing power, directly controlled territories, in the partial, or complete, disregard to the will of the indigenous peoples of those territories, to rule themselves. This was especially true in the British Empire of Africa, which was falling apart in the years 1957–1965, during the time when the United Kingdom was under Macmillan's leadership.

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