Opinion by Maria Zakharova

Anglo-Saxon politics is an amazing thing. In recent years in Washington and London, people of unknown gender with brazen faces have set about giving other countries grades in democracy – developed, undeveloped, half-developed, or underdeveloped. Before that, they rated economies. But since many developing countries today can give the States a run for their money, and London has generally suffocated in the dust left by its former colonies galloping away, they have wisely decided to leave economic assessments alone. Now they are assessing regulations of democracy.

American-British seminars and symposia persistently surface in the African countries – something like Measuring Democracy: A Liberal Marathon of Desires.

Some 60 years ago, until 1966, there was a place in Southern Africa known as Bechuanaland. Now it’s called Botswana, but back then, it was a British protectorate, another colony that London established to restrain the growth of German and Portuguese colonies, and to plunder its gold. It is clear that the Anglo-Saxons never bothered to develop that region because they only needed it for their imperialist ambitions, and the people living in Bechuanaland were adamantly oppressed.

However, shortly after World War II, the heir to the ruling dynasty of Bechuanaland – Prince Seretse Khama – went to Britain to study at Oxford and... fell in love. The brilliantly educated young man fell in love with the daughter of a royal officer, Ruth Williams, and he proposed to her. One would ask, what’s the big deal? Yes, for a prince, that marriage could be seen as morganatic, but he was in love.

However, the advocates of democracy were outraged − white officials from South Africa and their colleagues in the British Cabinet of Ministers were seriously opposed to the marriage of a white Englishwoman and a black African from a colony. And democracy miraculously legitimised that attitude.

The young bride was personally visited by the British Secretary for Commonwealth Affairs who told Ruth that if she did not give up her African, it could be the beginning of the end of the British Empire in Africa.

But Ruth remained steadfast.

Alas, they were not allowed to marry in public: the Anglican priest, under pressure from the authorities, refused to marry them. If they had been the same color – and today also the same-sex – it would have been a different story, but at that time, the British crown did not see the marriage between a man and a woman of different skin colours as God-pleasing. So they just quietly married at a civil registry office.

The pro-British authorities in the colonies openly condemned the marriage of a prince and an English woman. The white prime minister of South Africa openly told the world that the union was “nauseating,” and violated moral interracial laws.

Can you imagine? One race could oppress another, but one race could not love the other. Isn’t this a charming version of democracy?

The following year, the National Party lobbied for a law banning interracial marriage in South Africa, and the British authorities refused to let Ruth and Seretse leave the country. They had to actually spend the next eight long years under house arrest in London.

But this story has a good ending. When the British Empire began to crumble into pieces (as the minister had warned young Ruth), the tribal leaders of Bechuanaland demanded that Elizabeth II release the prince and his wife so they could go to Africa. The risk of an armed confrontation forced the British to back down. Seretse Khama and his wife reached his homeland.

He never became a real king, but... together with his wife, they led the movement for independence, and Khama was elected the first president of his country, since then called Botswana. The apartheid regime in neighbouring South Africa endured for some time, but also collapsed, despite support from the British elite.

I am now reading the news about Americans teaching Africans in Botswana how to build democracy in their country. They convene their “crony” summits they love, invite experts, and bring in democratisation specialists from the State Department. The Anglo-Saxons – the very people who have for centuries tormented their colonies around the world, and the Americans – who once turned the African continent into a natural resource for free labour.

And not once has Western democracy let itself take a break from business, never stopped to obsessively share its blessings. It will drive itself to death like this. It’s already exhausted.