Churchill’s life intersected with South Africa in diverse, at times intense ways well captured in the Churchill Archive. His father Randolph spent several months in South Africa in 1891, corresponding with him about the country (CHAR 1/2/58-59). Winston took an early journalistic interest in South Africa. His unpublished 1897 essay ‘Our Account with the Boers’ (CHAR 1/19/1-21) was jingoistic and hostile to ‘Boers’ (Dutch-speaking White South Africans, later known as Afrikaners). In 1899 he arrived in South Africa as a press correspondent of the South African (Boer) War (1899-1902). Captured near Ladysmith and imprisoned in Pretoria, his dramatic escape and flight back to British territory accrued much publicity (CHAR 1/23), as did his accounts, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (CHAR 8/11) and its sequel, Ian Hamilton’s March (1900), both based on his letters to the Morning Post newspaper. The war was a significant formative influence and a major issue in the 1900 ‘khaki’ election when Churchill was first elected to parliament. In The World Crisis 1911–15 (1928), he highlighted the conflict as a harbinger of a coming violent century.

In his role as parliamentary Undersecretary for the Colonies (1905-7), Churchill had much to do with South Africa, playing an important part overseeing new constitutions and self-rule (by the White population only) of the Transvaal and Orange River Colony. (CHAR 10) He argued for magnanimity to defeated Boers and, following the peace treaty, stood by their refusal to allow Black people the franchise. (CHAR 9/21) At a short meeting with Mahatma Gandhi, then a prominent leader of Indian South Africans, he promised to consider their strong opposition to enforced finger-printing, at first rejecting the relevant Transvaal legislation but making known he would not oppose the law when it was, subsequently, re-introduced.

In World War I, as First Lord of the Admiralty (1911-15) Churchill liaised with South Africa on naval operations, including safety of their troopships. He supported deployment in Britain of Black South African labourers to free White soldiers for the Front. When Jan Smuts, South Africa’s Minister of Defence, came to Britain in 1917, Churchill urged his appointment to the Imperial War Cabinet, and the two men worked closely on the War Priorities Committee, the start of a long, close friendship. (CHAR 2/90/25) Both were early advocates for an air force. In 1922 Churchill refused in the Commons to criticise Smuts’s use of aerial bombardment against Namibians protesting a dog tax. Churchill was criticised from the Right by Afrikaner nationalists seeking to sever imperial relations and from the Left by socialists for his hostility to strikes, rejection of self-determination of colonised nations, and for promoting invasions of Soviet Russia, where South African Lieutenant-Colonel Jack Sherwood-Kelly, VC, publicly criticised the campaign in which Churchill had authorised use of chemical weapons.

As Secretary of State for War (1919-21) during the Irish War of Independence, Churchill deployed Boer War veterans to form the notorious Black and Tans force and pondered using tactics from that war to reconquer Ireland, but the intervention of Smuts helped broker a peace leading to Ireland’s Dominion status. As Secretary of State for the Colonies (1921-2) Churchill continued to interact with South Africa’s White leaders. In 1921 the Smuts-Churchill Agreement transferred to Pretoria responsibility for land defence of the British naval base at Simonstown, Cape Town, though still subject to Royal Navy use. Churchill was involved in a commission investigating responsible government for Southern Rhodesia when Pretoria hoped to incorporate that colony but, if somewhat favourable to the idea, did not move in this direction. At the 1921 Imperial conference he defended Smuts’ denial of political equality for Indians. Churchill was increasingly hostile to the independence of India from this time and, if displaying greater sensitivity to the plight of the East African Indian diaspora, aroused antagonism in the Indian South African press for abandoning Indian political rights. (CHAR 17/22) Trade with the Dominions concerned Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1924–9), justifying his 1925 decision to return to the gold standard—which would initially lead to lower profits for South African mining companies—by South Africa’s own impending move in that direction. (CHAR 9/71) Afrikaner nationalist J. B. M. Hertzog, Smuts’ successor as prime minister, urged full independence for the Dominions which was consummated in the 1931 Statute of Westminster and strenuously opposed by Churchill.

South African influences were evident in Churchill’s World War II leadership. Smuts again participated in the war cabinet and was Churchill’s regular, trusted confidant on military and political matters (CHAR 20 and CHUR 5/37A-D); Churchill kept on his desk a portrait of Smuts, one of his few close friends. Churchill’s enthusiasm for special military operations had initial roots in the Boer War, of which several of his wartime officials were veterans.

The apartheid regime under D. F. Malan came to power in South Africa in 1948, and by 1951 when Churchill returned to power its extreme racist policies were evident, but Churchill did little to indicate strong opposition, referring to Malan as a ‘gentleman’. Instead, military and economic relations dominated British policy. Already in 1944-5 Churchill’s government had indicated close interest in South African uranium and as the Cold War developed nuclear collaboration intensified, with Pretoria keen to link this to increased migrant labour from British colonies in Southern Africa. In 1951, Churchill insisted that Simonstown naval base not be fully transferred to South African control without definite assurances of British use in peace and wartime. Such assurances were given not long after his resignation as Prime Minister in 1955. (CHUR 2/128A-B) He continued to follow long-established policy on the High Commission Territories (Lesotho, Botswana, and Swaziland). In 1944, Churchill had deferred Pretoria’s attempts to gain assent for their incorporation and in November 1951 responded to threats from Malan by reiterating that transference required consultation with the inhabitants; in 1954 he discouraged Malan from pressing the issue. In 1950 Churchill condemned the Labour government’s action to deceive Seretse Khama, heir apparent of the Bamangwato people of Botswana into coming to England as ‘a very disreputable transaction’ (Hansard, Column 289, 8 March 1950) but followed government policy and the advice of Smuts (who feared Malan would exploit the case to declare South Africa a republic) in not attacking Seretse’s forced abdication, aware that fear of repercussions with Pretoria was uppermost in the decision. (CHUR 2/101A-B)

Churchill’s role in the Boer War and World War II is still remembered in South Africa but the end of apartheid and decolonisation saw a rethinking of colonialism and white supremacy with which Churchill and Smuts sometimes are associated. And yet, Black African leaders admired Churchill’s wartime leadership. Nelson Mandela at the Treason Trial (1955-61) said he admired Churchill as a forceful, militant leader, but not his political theories, notably having condemned the Churchill government’s savage repression of Kenyan land and independence struggles in 1952. On Parliament Square, Westminster, are statues of Smuts (1956), Churchill (1973), Mandela (2007) and Gandhi (2015), but in South Africa the former two have a fading legacy. Mandela’s successor President Thabo Mbeki in a 2005 address to the National Assembly of Sudan noted Churchill’s 1898 military role in that country under Lord Kitchener, and cited Churchill’s derogatory comments about Islamic countries, and by extension Africans, in The River War (1899). Such prejudices, Mbeki argued, were extended to all colonised peoples, including in South Africa whose White colonisers, in some cases the same figures that fought in the Sudan, deployed such attitudes to justify colonialism. Mbeki’s critical comments reflect this reassessment. Nevertheless, over seven decades, interactions between Churchill and South Africans were complex, multi-faceted, and influential.