Conveners: Rebekah Lee and Doris Okenwa
Speaker: Hilary Sapire (Birkbeck, University of London)
Discussant: William Beinart (ASC, Oxford)
Exploring the entwined histories of British royal visits to Southern Africa in the twentieth century, the book British Royal Visits and Black Loyalism in Twentieth Century Southern Africa (Palgrave, 2024) analyses the clashing voices of dissent and cheering crowds that accompanied royal tours, providing insight into the shifting nature of ‘Black loyalism.’ Originating in the Indigenous empire loyalism of eighteenth-century Canada, Black loyalism encompassed loyalty to the British crown and a shared ideology of ‘rights and ‘entitlements,’ which positioned the crown as a source of protection against white settler rapacity, colonial violence, and racial oppression. However, expressions of monarchical devotion were often double-edged and addressed the fundamental contradiction of a crown that was both the source of rights and complicit in colonial conquest, appropriation, and misrule. It was on royal occasions such as jubilees, coronation celebrations, and especially royal visits, when the sovereign was literally amongst their more distant subjects, that loyalist sentiment was rekindled, reinvented, and made directly relevant to the concerns of the day. By analysing change and continuity in Black perspectives towards both the British and Indigenous African monarchy during these visits, British Royal Visits and Black Loyalism examines an array of Black Southern African discourses on governance, political values, and cultural identities across the region. It argues that the refashioning of British imperial monarchy in the twentieth century was profoundly shaped by African initiatives and re-imaginings.
Hilary Sapire has been based in the School of Historical Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London since 1992, where she teaches global, imperial and African History. Her book British Royal Visits and Black Loyalism draws on years of research on the cultural and social history of modern Southern Africa and brings together her interests in the connected histories of monarchical display; imperial loyalism, kingship in the region. She is currently jointly writing a book on Prince Alfred's 1860 travels in South and West Africa. Hilary is a former editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies.
