The Foreign Office is once again reaching for the smelling salts as fresh hostilities flare between Nigeria and South Africa. A new wave of anti-migrant violence in the Rainbow Nation has sent diplomatic cables buzzing between Lagos and Pretoria, and our own mandarins in Whitehall are no doubt composing the usual tepid statements about 'restraint' and 'dialogue'. One almost expects them to suggest a round of Victorian-era arbitration, complete with monocles and a map of empire. But let us not pretend this is a mere squabble between two distant dominions. It is a symptom of a deeper sickness, a return to the tribal hatreds we thought the twentieth century had buried.
Take the South African reaction. We see the same ugly populism that gripped Europe in the 1930s, the same scapegoating of the foreigner for economic stagnation. The Nigerian community, many of whom have built prosperous lives in Johannesburg and Cape Town, are being burned out of their shops and hounded from their homes. The South African government, led by a ruling party that once stood for universal liberation, now winks at mob violence to appease its restive base. Sound familiar? It is the script of every declining hegemonic order, from Rome to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
And what of Britain, the former imperial referee? Our response is a masterclass in impotence. We call for 'calm' while our own streets seethe with anti-immigrant sentiment. We lecture others on tolerance when our press is filled with bile about 'foreign gangs' and 'cultural incompatibility'. The irony would be delicious if it were not so tragic. We are the ghost of empire, haunting the periphery with our moralising until a real crisis forces us to reveal our hollowed core.
But there is a more immediate danger. This tension threatens to unravel the fragile architecture of intra-Commonwealth trade and diplomacy. Nigeria is Africa's largest economy, South Africa its most industrialised. If these two giants turn their backs on each other, it will not be a local spat; it will be a continental catastrophe. And who will step in? The United Nations is paralysed, the African Union toothless, and the Commonwealth Secretariat a glorified book club. Great powers of the past would have dispatched gunboats or at least a stern envoy; we send a press release.
The lesson of history is that such flare-ups do not merely pass. They accumulate, like dry timber in a drought. The fire this time may be in Soweto or Lagos, but the sparks will travel. Britain can either pretend this is none of our concern, or we can recognise that our own fate is entwined with the Commonwealth's. We built this machine, after all. We have a duty to oil it or admit that we are no longer fit to be its keepers.
So here is a thought to unsettle your morning tea: If the Commonwealth fractures along racial and national lines, where does that leave post-Brexit Britain? A small island adrift, clutching at American coattails while the world burns. Perhaps it is time to stop musing about the fall of Rome and start preventing our own.
