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HARRY’S WAR
Clockwise: The prince
was filmed using racist
terms while serving in
Afghanistan in 2006;
the wedding will not
change “inherited racism”
says Afua Hirsch; the
2005 wedding of Prince
Charles and Camilla.
the dysfunction and scandals. The incredible success of Netflix’s
The Crown proves there is a huge appetite for splendorous old
pageantry mixed with modern twists. It keeps the masses ecstatic
and loyal.
Though not a royalist, I have watched this dynasty since I was a
little girl. What a long way they seem to have come, these supreme
survivors. In 1931, Edward, the Prince of Wales, fell in love with a
divorced American socialite, Wallis Simpson. After George V’s death,
the prince became King Edward VIII. Not for long. The establishment
decided Edward’s marriage made him unfit to be king. He
abdicated. In 1952, Princess Margaret, the queen’s willful sister, fell
in love with Peter Townsend, a wartime hero but divorced, and so
forbidden. She renounced her lover one rainy day in October 1955.
In 1977, along came Diana—a 16-year-old virgin when she met
Prince Charles. Four years later, she had the big dress and wedding.
Her husband carried on with his long-term mistress, the alsomarried
Camilla Parker-Bowles, while unhappy Di produced two
sons, William and Harry. This lovely aristocrat rejected royal protocol
and hauteur, instinctively treated people as equals and embraced diverse
individuals, sometimes literally. The public loved their princess,
but the unyielding Windsors were frightened by her. Her inclusivity
was an asset to the firm, but they could not value what she was or did.
(There are lessons for Meghan in these histories.)
The divorce was painful, but it freed Diana. She fell in love with
two Muslim men and might have married one of them. Imagine
how the royal family would have coped with that! Luckily for them,
she died before she tested them further. Charles, meanwhile, married
his Camilla, now Duchess of Cornwall. Divorce was no longer
a sin or a red line. Harry’s kinfolk, Markle’s future in-laws, now
come across as welcoming and responsive,
more Diana-like.
Class lines are also dissolving.
I’m delighted that a mixed-race woman is marrying into the British royal family,
which resides at the top of the aristocratic hierarchy. It’s so powerfully and positively
symbolic. Rather like Obama winning the American presidency, it was unthinkable until
they actually got engaged. My white English mother and Nigerian father faced terrible
hostility in Britain when they married in the 1950s. The marriage of Meghan and Harry
is a sign of how far we’ve come as a nation. —BERNARDINE EVARISTO is an award-winning British
author of eight books and founder of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize.