Queen Elizabeth: monarch who had to adjust to the shift from Empire to Commonwealth

📅 Published: August 21, 2025

📰 Source: thestandard

Curated by AllZimNews.com

This had been heralded by the demands of the Indian National Congress throughout the previous half-century.

Even after India’s departure from the Empire, it was widely assumed that Britain would stay on in Africa for many decades.

But how quickly things changed.

Riots in the Gold Coast in 1948 led swiftly to the appointment of Kwame Nkrumah as Chief Minister and the introduction of self-government.

Within the space of just a few years, the Gold Coast became independent as Ghana in 1957.

The process of colonial withdrawal from Africa had begun, hastened by the political and economic cost of Britain’s bloody suppression of Mau-Mau in Kenya in the early and mid 1950s.

British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was to acknowledge that a historic and unstoppable shift was taking place when he delivered his famous “winds of change” speech to the South African parliament in 1960.

The decade and a half that followed saw one African country after another proceeding to independence.

Most experienced a brief period when they retained the queen as head of State.

Yet it was not long before they abandoned even this colonial relic, opting instead for executive presidents to lead them into the future.

The queen’s private thoughts about all this will remain obscure until the release of royal archives in years to come.

Yet the outward signs are that she adjusted personally and as monarch to these immense changes with aplomb and good grace.