Blue Skies into White Space: Southern African Responses to the Trans-African Flight of the Silver Queen, 1920

The first trans-African flight from London to Cape Town in 1920 was feted by white observers as a major achievement in consolidating the links between South Africa and the British Empire. Probing the comments made by black and white contemporary observers on the meaning of the flight, this article explores the cultural and political connotations of aviation in a colonial and imperial setting. It emphasizes that the celebration of the superiority of Western technology as a tool in the consolidation of white minority rule was marked by white anxieties about African disobedience. The public responses to the flight of the Silver Queen also reverberated with the debates between Afrikaners and British South Africans about the shaping of a white South African identity. Nationalist Afrikaners hesitated to welcome the flight because it was viewed as a symbol of closer connections with the Empire. Cultural differences and political conflicts, not only between whites and blacks but also within the white settler society, influenced the public discourse about technological progress.