“Make America Great Again.” Those words have been gently haunting me not because of their political loading but because they have been reminding me of something, like the snatches of a tune or a poem that isn’t fully remembered but drifts into your consciousness from time to time.

Then it came to me: It wasn’t the words, but the meaning, or, more precisely, the reasoning behind the meaning.

I grew up among the last embers of the British Empire in Southern Rhodesia. I am often asked what it was like there.

All I can tell you is that it was like growing up in Britain, maybe in one of the nicer places in the Home Counties (those adjacent to London), but with some very African aspects and, of course, with the Africans themselves, whose land it was until Cecil John Rhodes and his British South Africa Company decided it should be British; part of a dream that Britain would rule from Cape Town to Cairo.

Evelyn Waugh, the British author, said in 1937 of Southern Rhodesia that the settlers had a “morbid lack of curiosity” about the indigenous people. Although it was less heinous than it sounds, there was a lot of truth to that. They were there, and now we were there, and it was how it was with two very different peoples on the same piece of land.

However, by the 1950s, change was in the air. Britain came out of World War II less interested in its empire than ever. In 1947, under the Labor government of Clement Attlee, which came to power after the wartime government of Winston Churchill, it relinquished control of the Indian subcontinent — now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

It was set to gradually withdraw from the rest of the world. The empire was to be renamed the Commonwealth. It was to be a club of former possessions, often more semantically connected than united in other ways.

The end of the empire wasn’t universally accepted, and it wasn’t accepted in the African colonies that had attracted British settlers, always referred to not as “Whites” but as “Europeans.”

I can remember the mutterings and a widespread belief that the greatness that had put “Great” into the name Great Britain would return. The world map would remain with Britain’s incredible holdings in Asia and Africa, colored for all time in red. People said things like the “British lion will awake, just you see.”

It was a hope that there would be a return to what was regarded as the glory days of the empire when Britain led the world militarily, politically, culturally, scientifically, and with what was deeply believed to be British exceptionalism.

That feeling, while nearly universal among colonials, wasn’t shared by the citizens back home in Britain. They differed from those in the colonies in that they were sick of war and were delighted by the social services that the Labor government had introduced, like universal healthcare, and weren’t rescinded by the second Churchill administration, which took power in 1951.

The empire was on its last legs, and Churchill’s 1942 declaration, “I did not become the king’s first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire,” was long forgotten. But not in the colonies, and certainly not where I was. Our fathers had served in the war and were super-patriotic.

While in Britain, they were experimenting with socialism and the trade unions were amassing power, and migration from the West Indies had begun changing attitudes. In the colonies, belief flourished in what might now be called a movement to make Britain great again.

In 1954, London got an organization, the League of Empire Loyalists, which was more warmly embraced in the dwindling empire than it was in Britain. It was founded by an extreme conservative, Arthur K. Chesterton, who had had fascist sympathies before the war.

In Britain, the league attracted some extreme right-wing Conservative members of parliament but little public support. Where I was, it was the organization that was going to Make Britain Great Again.

It fizzled after a Conservative prime minister, Harold MacMillan,  put an end to dreaming of the past. In a speech in South Africa, he said that “winds of change” were blowing through Africa, though most settlers still believed in the return of empire.

It took the war of independence in Rhodesia to bring home MacMillan’s message. We weren’t going to Make Britain Great Again.