South Africa Prepares To Give Visitors The Royal Treatment Britain’s Queen Elizabeth Will Visit After A Hiatus Of 48 Years

Higher taxes, soaring crime, what to do about Winnie Mandela. It’s all enough to give the new South Africa a headache.

But the tribulations of creating a non-racial democracy are receding this weekend as South Africa’s ship comes in - the royal yacht Britannia to be exact.

The ship is sailing into False Bay outside Cape Town in the service of Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, who arrives by plane today for her first visit to South Africa since she celebrated her birthday here as a shy princess of 21.

That was 48 years ago Friday, a year before the Nationalist Party took power and started legalizing apartheid. A lot has happened to Britain’s royal family since then, and a lot has happened to South Africa.

Now the Union flag and South Africa’s new six-color standard will fly side-by-side in what promises to be a jolly reunion of Mother Country and Returning Prodigal.

South Africa quit the Commonwealth in 1961 when it was being criticized for whites-only rule. It was welcomed back into the club of Britain and her former colonies only last year, after the election of a blackled government.

The visit by the queen and the Duke of Edinburgh is the figurative icing on the cake.

If the royals find it harder to get respect at home these days, they can look forward to reverential treatment during their week in South Africa, a country still giddy about important foreign guests after decades of sanctions-imposed isolation.

Buckingham Palace says the trip will be one of the most important of the queen’s reign, amounting to an endorsement of the country’s political transformations.

For six exhausting days, the queen and Prince Philip will be meeting with the high and the low of Cape Town, Soweto, Pretoria and Durban.

The pomp-filled visit, beginning with the gala docking of the Britannia in Cape Town on Monday morning, will be a time of rosy nostalgia and a chance to get away from the workaday problems of a government struggling awkwardly to right past wrongs.

Workers were primping the grounds of Parliament, adding fresh coats of paint and polishing the brass, where the queen will give the keynote speech of her stay in a nationally televised session Monday.

Practically every day starts with a garden party and ends with a dinner, with visits to black townships, clinics, schools and cemeteries sandwiched in between. For four of the six nights, the monarch will sleep on the royal yacht.

President Nelson Mandela, of royal Xhosa blood and raised to be a counselor to kings, ought to be in his element. But he has already decreed that he will wear a suit, not a tuxedo, for the state banquets.

Though philosophically an African nationalist, Mandela has made a lifelong habit of the English customs and manners he learned as a boy at missionary school in the 1920s.

“I confess to being something of an Anglophile,” he says in his autobiography. Particularly important for him, he said, was the model of an English gentleman and the democracy and freedom embodied in the British parliamentary system.

For some Afrikaners, who remember with bitterness British concentration camps in the Boer War at the turn of the century, England symbolizes something else entirely. They will not be welcoming the royal couple.

Robert van Tonder, leader of the ultra-right Boerestaat Party, said his followers would simply ignore the arrival of “Mrs. Elizabeth Windsor.”