On her 21st birthday, April 21, 1947, when Britain's Princess Elizabeth accompanied her parents and her sister on a tour of South Africa, she spoke: "to all the peoples of the British Commonwealth and Empire, wherever they may live, of whatever race they may come from and by whom language they speak".
She further stated that she would dedicate her entire life to "the service of our great imperial family".
By the time she died on Balm Oral as Queen Elizabeth II on September 8, 2022, the empire was gone.
Britain's process of exiting the Empire began even before she ascended the throne (when she was on holiday in Kenya in June 1952) with Britain's withdrawal from India and Burma in 1947. This was heralded by the demands of the Indian National Congress over the previous half-century.
Even after India left the empire, it was widely assumed that Britain would remain in Africa for many decades. But how quickly things have changed. Riots in the Gold Coast in 1948 quickly led to the appointment of Kwame Nkrumah as Prime Minister and the introduction of self-government.
Within just a few years, the Gold Coast became independent as Ghana in 1957. A process of colonial withdrawal from Africa began, accelerated by the political and economic costs of Britain's bloody suppression of the Mau Mau in Kenya in the early and mid-1950s years of the 20th century.
British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan should have recognized that a historic and unstoppable shift was taking place when he delivered his famous "winds of change" speech in the South African Parliament in 1960.
The decade and a half that followed saw one African country gain independence. Most experienced a brief period of retaining the Queen as head of state. Yet it wasn't long before they abandoned even this colonial relic, opting instead for executive presidents to lead them into the future.
The Queen's private thoughts on all this will remain unclear until the royal archives are released in the coming years. But the outward signs are that she has adapted both personally and as a monarch to these immense changes with confidence and good grace.
She was not reactionary when it came to Africa.
Relationships
Her personal relationships with many African leaders were an important indicator of the social and attitudinal changes that accompanied the shift from Empire to Commonwealth. One indicator was her famous dance with Kwame Nkrumah when she visited Ghana in 1961.
At the time, Nkrumah was developing his cult of personality and seemingly moved Ghana into the orbit of the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. The British government saw her visit as a way to strengthen the former colony's ties to the Commonwealth.
In The Crown, a recent Netflix series about the monarchy during her reign, the incident where she danced with Nkrumah is presented as an event with significant political implications, as if her embrace on the dance floor with the Ghanaian president was the key to keeping him in a political grip. Britain.
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