The Wind of Change speech was a historically important address made by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to the Parliament of South Africa, on 3 February 1960 in Cape Town. He had spent a month in Africa visiting a number of British colonies, as they were at the time. The speech signalled clearly that the Conservative-controlled British Government intended to grant independence to many of these territories, which indeed happened subsequently, with most of the British possessions in Africa becoming independent nations in the 1960s. The Labour governments of 1945–51 had started a process of decolonisation but this policy had been halted by the Conservative governments from 1951 onwards.
The speech acquired its name from a now-famous quotation embedded in it. Macmillan said:
The occasion was in fact the second time on which Macmillan had given this speech: he was repeating an address already made in Accra, Ghana (formerly the British colony of the Gold Coast) on 10 January 1960. This time it received press attention, at least partly because of the stony reception that greeted it.
Macmillan's Cape Town speech also made it clear that Macmillan included South Africa in his comments and indicated a shift in British policy in regard to apartheid with Macmillan saying:
Besides restarting the policy of decolonisation, the speech marked political shifts that were to occur within the next year or so, in the Union of South Africa and the United Kingdom. The formation of the Republic of South Africa in 1961 and the country's departure from the Commonwealth of Nations were the result of a number of factors, but the change in the UK's attitude to African self-government is usually considered to have been significant.
There was an extended backlash against the speech from the right of the Conservative Party, which wished Britain to retain its imperial possessions. The speech led directly to the formation of the Conservative Monday Club pressure group.
The speech is also popularly (and inaccurately) known as the "winds of change" speech. Macmillan himself, in titling the first volume of his memoirs Winds of Change (1966), seems to have acquiesced to popular misquotation.
The Portuguese Colonial War started in 1961 in Angola, and extended to other Portuguese overseas territories at the time, namely Portuguese Guinea in 1963 and Mozambique in 1964. By refusing to grant independence to its overseas territories in Africa, the Portuguese ruling regime of Estado Novo was criticized by most of the international community, and its leaders Salazar and Caetano were accused of being blind to the so called "Winds of change". After the Carnation revolution in 1974 and the fall of the incumbent Portuguese authoritarian regime, almost all the Portugal-ruled territories outside Europe became independent. Several historians have described the stubbornness of the regime as a lack of sensibility to the "Winds of change". For the regime those overseas possessions were a matter of national interest.