The 1923 Imperial Conference opened in London.
Officially the Imperial Economic Conference, and the first one at which the Irish Free State was there, its principal concern was the rights of the Dominions in regard to determining their own foreign policy.
The naive, and indeed racist, quality of the meeting came forward in regard to a discussion on voting equality, about which Jan Smuts, of South Africa but of course a Boer, noted:
If there was to be equal manhood suffrage over the Union, the whites would be swamped by the blacks. A distinction could not be made between Indians and Africans. They would be impelled by the inevitable force of logic to go the whole hog, and the result would be that not only would the whites be swamped in Natal by the Indians but the whites would be swamped all over South Africa by the blacks and the whole position for which the whites had striven for two hundred years or more now would be given up. So far as South Africa was concerned, therefore, it was a question of impossibility. For white South Africa it was not a question of dignity but a question of existence.
W.E.B. Dubois, in turn, noted:
This almost naïve setting of the darker races beyond the pale of democracy and of modern humanity was listened to with sympathetic attention in England. It is without doubt today the dominant policy of the British Empire,
It would prove to be the Empire's demise.
Not a dominion, but a colony, Southern Rhodesia, later Rhodesia, later Zimbabwe, was granted "responsible government" status. Its voters chose self-governance in 1922 rather than a union with South Africa.
The news from Cole Creek remained grim.
