The Queen of Rhodesia Versus the Queen of the United Kingdom: Conflicts of Allegiance in Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence

Abstract

When, on 11th November 1965, the Rhodesian cabinet assembled before the international press in Salisbury, they had before them an illuminated ‘Unilateral Declaration of Independence’, which, borrowing some phrases from the American Declaration of 1776, set out their justification for the growing impasse between them and the British Government and highlighted their profound tradition of loyalty to the Crown. There was one crucial divergence from its 1776 archetype, however, for it closed with the loyal salutation ‘God Save the Queen’. Reigning conspicuously over the drama of this very British coup was a large portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. British governments had faced paradoxically menacing and vociferous expressions of ‘loyalty’ before, particularly in Ulster in 1912 and Kenya in 1919, but there was now a significant difference: Rhodesia had possessed for decades the widest degree of responsible government, only marginally short of dominion status, with its own prime minister and cabinet and effective control over its well-equipped armed forces; all presided over by a governor whose constitutional duties generally resembled those of a dominion governor-general. The rebel government’s stated assertion of enduring loyalty to the Queen presented the British Government and the monarchy with a challenging dilemma, for, crucially, it was attempting to seize the status of a dominion, with continuing allegiance to the Sovereign, rather than that of a republic. This distinction was of immense symbolic significance for the judiciary, police and armed forces in particular, as well as for the Rhodesian public at large, both African and European, and for the electoral stability of the regime. There were no changes to the wording of oaths of allegiance. The Union Flag continued to be flown and ‘God Save the Queen’ continued to be sung. The regime ignored its sacking by the Governor, Sir Humphrey Gibbs, and unilaterally appointed one of its own nominees as an ‘Officer Administering the Government’, borrowing the traditional title of a governor-ad interim, and claiming a continuing allegiance to Elizabeth II as the ‘Queen of Rhodesia’, whom it distinguished sharply from the Queen of the United Kingdom, the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s constitutional instrument. Thus, the regime hoped that this semblance of loyal constitutional continuity might be maintained. This chapter examines the central emblematic role and position of the Crown in this peculiar rebellion.