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She is emphatically not a racist. ‘I found her enormously principled on all these issues,’
Sir Sonny said.
Whether we were talking about poverty or about racism, apartheid, UDI, she was always on the high moral
ground and she was very wise to the degree to which politicians would try to manipulate her into situations
in which she might be compromised. There was never any doubt in my mind where she stood on issues like
Rhodesia or apartheid but nobody wanted to get her into the controversy with Mrs Thatcher. Sometimes she
came so close that it was only her moral strength that saw it through… at Lusaka, it was very important that
the Queen should be there and be able to use her influence with Kenneth Kaunda if things got tricky…
Elizabeth flew off to Africa several days in advance of the Lusaka meeting, visiting
Kenya, Malawi and Tanzania before arriving in Lusaka to be greeted by thousands of
Zambians and the plaudits of the government-owned Zambia Daily Mail, which
contrasted her ‘extraordinary loving heart’ with what they saw as the Iron Lady’s
unsympathetic feelings. Thatcher arrived late that night accompanied by Lord
Carrington, who graphically described her apprehension and also her courage as their
plane descended towards Lusaka airport. She was well aware of the feeling that had
been stirred up about her and, as the plane taxied to a halt, she took a pair of sunglasses
out of her handbag and put them on. ‘She was afraid of having acid thrown in her face,’
said Carrington. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told her, ‘they’re going to love you.’ She put them
away and they did love her – temporarily at least. Softened up by Elizabeth, Kenneth
Kaunda swept Margaret Thatcher on to the dance floor after the opening banquet. At
Lusaka Malcolm Fraser, the Australian Prime Minister, who had been instrumental in
persuading Mrs Thatcher to sign the communiqué confirming that the heads of
government ‘were wholly committed to genuine black majority rule for the people of
Zimbabwe’, earned her deep resentment by leaking its substance to the media before the
formal signing. Elizabeth had remained, as she always did on these occasions, in the
background. She takes no part in the actual conference sessions. As had now become
traditional, at various intervals during the day individual Commonwealth leaders
slipped away to have a private talk with her. Sir Sonny Ramphal said of those meetings:
Nobody was ever indifferent to that because of what she brought to it. First of all because for a long time she
had been friends of these people, many of them had grown up with her in office. Julius Nyerere and Kenneth
Kaunda and people like that from Africa were young men when she became Queen, making their way in
political life. She knew them as young Prime Ministers, and young Presidents and so over many years they
were friends. Secondly, she did her homework prodigiously – the one comment I got from all of them was,
‘My goodness, how aware the Queen is of our situation.’ She would know who was in the clutches of the
IMF, who had got what political scandal raging, she’d know the family side of things, if there were children
or deaths in the family. She’d know about the economy, she’d know about elections coming up. They felt
they were talking to a friend who cared about the country, the people concerned… It was that sort of
informality and, to me, it made a lot of difference to the meeting because it was another bit of glue that made
them a collective, and the Queen was very conscious of this kind of valuable role she was playing…
The success of the Lusaka Conference, at which both Mrs Thatcher and the Africans