by Akala
If we go to Kenya, where Mr Ferguson grew up in the shadows of the gulag, we could talk to Ngu˜g˜ı wa Thiong’o, unquestionably the most well-known Kenyan novelist and scholar and a man imprisoned by Jomo Kenyatta’s repressive – UK-backed – ‘independent’ government. Despite his accurate and persistent criticisms of the corruption and brutality of African elites, has he resorted to forgetting that British rule was horrendous? Nope. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find prominent intellectuals from any of Britain’s non-white former colonies, or Ireland, who are both respected in their native lands and who share Britain’s romantic and fond memories of its empire. Why is this so? To understand why people across the world have such a different understanding of British colonialism we must address a number of things.
First, Britons were submitted to generations of deliberate imperialist, militarist propaganda in all areas of culture, from education to the cinema, theatre and music halls and in the production of huge imperial exhibitions at Wembley and elsewhere.24 The myopia this propaganda still produces was aptly captured when Secretary of State for International Trade Liam Fox said in 2016, in the run-up to the EU referendum, that ‘the United Kingdom is one of the few countries in the European Union that does not need to bury its twentieth-century history.’ Funny, because Britain is in fact one of the few countries in the world that literally did bury a good portion of its twentieth-century history.
During the period of decolonisation, the British state embarked upon a systematic process of destroying the evidence of its crimes. Codenamed ‘Operation Legacy’, the state intelligence agencies and the Foreign Office conspired to literally burn, bury at sea or hide vast amounts of documents containing potentially sensitive details of things done in the colonies under British rule.25 Anything that might embarrass the government, that would show religious or racial intolerance or be used ‘unethically’ by a post-independence government was ordered destroyed or hidden. The Foreign Office were forced to admit in court about having hidden documents, then were unforthcoming about the scale of what was hidden, to the point that you’d be a fool to trust anything that is now said. But from what we know, hundreds of thousands of pages of documents were destroyed and over a million hidden, not just starting in the colonial period but dating all the way back to 1662. This operation was only exposed to the public in 2011 as part of a court case between the survivors of British concentration camps in Kenya and the government.
What this means is that it is completely impossible to write a truly accurate history of the British Empire, and anything written before Operation Legacy was revealed is certainly incomplete. It’s revealing that some ‘historians’ – that is people whose profession is supposed to be guided by evidence – have not taken to reviewing their thoughts about the wonders of the British Empire even after such a revelation. The destruction of historical memory is not limited to documents – while Britain has preserved the HMS Victory as a tribute to Nelson, as well as other ships from key periods of British history, not a single slave ship survives.26 You have to stand in awe of the intellectual obedience it takes to still cheer for empire after the revelation that the government hid or burned a good portion of the evidence of what that empire actually consisted of, but such is the use to which we put our free thinking. You see, imperial apologists would like to view themselves as the apogee of Western thinking, as great contributors to the impressive history of Western intellectual inquiry, when in fact they actually represent its ossification. They represent the very ‘decline of the West’ that they bemoan. Say what we might about the brutality of European colonial expansion but we cannot deny that European thinkers from Giordano Bruno to William Tyndale, Thomas Paine to Bertrand Russell, have faced persecution and even death to push the intellectual envelope in their respective societies and times. Liberal apologists for empire are nothing but glorified cheerleaders for the current powers and status quo, who on the one hand bemoan the moralism of critics of empire, yet simultaneously claim that what made the British Empire superior to all others in the world’s history was its apparently enlightened morals.
Thus the propaganda continues. Most people are still not at all aware of what has been done in their name, such as the deliberate starving to death of millions of people in India, the imprisonment and mass torture of British-Kenyans in concentration camps in the 1950s, the removal of the population of Diego Garcia for a US army base, widespread use of torture and a swathe of secret wars that have seen the British military active for almost all of the last 100 years, including the supposed ‘post-war’ period. People are also unaware of the degree to which British rule was violently resisted everywhere it trod across the globe. This resistance was so widespread that the historian Richard Gott has been able to fill an entire mammoth tome with just these episodes of rebellion and tell the story of the empire in reverse, through the eyes of its resistors.27 It’s rather odd, then, that if what the British Empire was offering was so self-evidently a good deal for all, the restless natives so often picked up their guns to fight against it. Either the natives were too stupid to know what was good for them, or perhaps what was being offered was not such a sweet deal after all.
But the final reason we don’t have a greater critical dialogue about the empire is plain old racism: many would not care even if they knew the history well. What we do is OK, what others do is bad. It is worth quoting the historian John Newsinger at length here:
What they have to be asked is how they would respond if other states had done to Britain what the British state has done to other countries. How pro-imperialist would they feel for example if, instead of Britain forcing opium on the Chinese Empire, it had been the other way round? What would their response be if, when the British government had tried to ban the importation of opium, the Chinese had sent a powerful military expedition to ravage the British coastline, bombard British ports, and slaughter British soldiers and civilians? What if, instead of seizing Hong Kong, the Chinese had seized Liverpool and used Merseyside as a bridgehead from which to dominate Britain for nearly a hundred years? What if further British resistance provoked another attack that led to the Chinese occupying London, looting and burning down Buckingham Palace and dictating humiliating peace terms? What if today there was an Imperial Museum in Beijing that still put on display the fruits of the Chinese pillage of Britain? None of this is fanciful because it is exactly what the British state did to China in the nineteenth century.28
The primary difference between Britain and other empires was not that ‘we were not as bad as the Belgians or the Third Reich’ – which is true but is such a shit boast – but that Britain succeeded in dominating the globe and still kind of does, albeit as a second fiddle to the USA in the Anglo-American Empire. The question we should ask today is not ‘were we as bad as the Germans?’ But rather, is it possible to critically and honestly reflect on Britain’s history in an attempt to build a more ethical future? Can Britain ever behave in the world like the democracy it claims to be, or is such a thing entirely impossible? Is it more important to cling on to power and prestige and outdated Victorian notions of dominance and superiority even if such a tendency may well help to accelerate another World War and helps cause unspeakable suffering globally? 59 per cent of Britons apparently think it is more important, and their prophets cannot even begin to imagine a world without empires and, you know what, it’s entirely possible that they will be proved right. One could quite reasonably argue based on world history that brutality, corruption, duplicity and aggression are actually good politics and the public just need to ‘grow up’ and accept that, but that is an entirely different conversation than pretending that British imperialism was and is motivated by a higher morality.
However, as much as a tendency to dominate, divide and brutalise has been a seeming constant for the past few millennia at least, so too has the tendency of sharing and co-operation, of rebellion against dominant powers and attempts to create a more just order. The degree to which humans have secured a
more just world has been born out of the struggles against empires as much as anything else.
While I’m sure Mr Ferguson and others would accuse me of ‘working myself up into a state of high moral indignation’ about the crimes of the British Empire, I’ll bet that he and others like him will be wearing their poppy every 11 November; that is, they will be ‘working themselves up into a state of high moral indignation’ about dead people when those dead people are truly British – the Kenyans tortured in the 1950s were legally British citizens but naturally there will be no poppies or tears for them. The implications are clear – some ancestors deserve to be remembered and venerated and others do not. Those that kill for Britain are glorious, those killed by Britain are unpeople. If we truly cared for peace, would we not remember the victims of British tyranny every 11 November too?
I speak about the British Empire so much not just because I live here and have been shaped by it – not that any historical interest needs explaining – but because its legacies are so clear and visible and because unlike the Spanish, Portuguese, German or Japanese Empires it still sort of exists, albeit in attenuated form as second fiddle to the American Empire, despite what our free press likes to pretend. Our ruling class and much of the citizenry seem to believe that it is still ‘our’ divine right to police the world and to hell with what the rest of the planet thinks. What is most fascinating about British intellectual discourse is that we can see brutality ever so clearly when it wears Japanese or German or Islamic clothes, but when it comes to looking in the mirror at the empire on which the sun never set – the eighteenth-century’s premier slave trader, the mother country of the Commonwealth and one of the pioneer countries in developing and then putting into practice the Enlightenment philosophy of white supremacy – so many suddenly become blind, deaf and dumb, unable to see murder as murder.
6 – Scotland and Jamaica
It is often said that I am half-Scottish and half-Jamaican, I have even said so myself, but this is an oversimplification that probably originates in a subconscious choice. My father is indeed of Jamaican heritage through both parents, though he was born in the UK. My maternal grandmother is Scottish but my maternal grandfather is actually English. My mum’s father was a very unpleasant man, and so deeply racist that he pretty much disowned his own daughter for falling in love with a black man. One of my few memories of visiting that granddad is of him telling me ‘jokingly’ to ‘paint myself white because you’re dirty’. I was maybe six years old. It’s hard to overstate the impact adults’ words have on a child, and even though I did not think much of my granddad because I barely knew the man, his ‘joke’ left such an impression that I remember the weather, the taste of the air, the quality of the light and the smell of freshly cut grass in his back garden at the exact moment he said it to me. Frozen like a photograph, it is my enduring memory of him. I do not recall being hurt though; oddly enough, I think what I felt was something more like embarrassment, disgust, maybe even pity for him.
My mum tried to maintain cordial relations with her parents but as it played out we saw them very little. My siblings and I got to know our maternal grandmother better once my granddad died, my older sister and I even went to visit her in Thailand, to where they had emigrated. Despite my granddad spending a lifetime complaining about the immigrants and darkies, he took his military pension and retired to Thailand and saw no contradiction. In typical expat style, he did not learn the language, did not integrate and did not particularly respect the culture; he lived in his enclave with other ‘expats’ from Australia and America and moaned about the Thais in their own country instead. After my granddad’s death, my white gran went native and got re-married to a Thai man, much to the chagrin of some members of the family. My granddad would have turned in his grave, but given how horrible he was to his own children I can only imagine what he must have been like towards my gran.
By contrast, and perhaps surprisingly, even though my mum and dad split up before I was born and despite the fact that my dad was not very close with his own mother – families, eh? – my mum maintained a very close relationship with my paternal, Jamaican grandmother. So it was that I spent most of my Sundays as a child at the home of Millicent Roberts, eating typical Caribbean food, staring at her cliché Windrush generation pictures of white Jesus and Queen Elizabeth II and sweating half to death, because even in the height of British summer she refused to turn the central heating down, even a notch.
It was via my grandmother that my mum was introduced to the wider Caribbean community in Camden. As a result of all this, it was the Caribbean side of my heritage that I grew up surrounded by and so came to identify with most. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed? I say Caribbean rather than specifically Jamaican as the community was very much made up of people from all of the English-speaking Caribbean islands and Guyana; my ‘step’-grandmother is from Grenada, for example. Weddings and funerals with the same soundtrack, the same rum cake with the white icing, Escovitch fish, hard food, carnival, sound-clashes, falling asleep at parents’ ‘blues dance’ parties, Saturday school, sometimes church, Rastafarian fathers clashing with Christian grandparents, reggae music, lovers rock, jungle.
There are certain things that every British Caribbean of my age has seen and experienced. We, quite consciously I think, feel like the last generation with such a direct connection ‘back home’, as our Caribbean grandparents will mostly die as our children come of age, so our coming to adulthood very much feels like the end of an era. ‘Who we will then become’ is one of the great questions of diaspora. How will our children and their children after that navigate being born black in Britain and of Caribbean heritage without the wisdom and laughter, the cooking and the cussing, of Caribbean-born grandparents? Will we become black English, or is that still a contradiction in terms? Will these connections be severed or will we maintain those links in honour of the generation that came here and sacrificed so much in so many ways? Who knows?
However, in many interesting, anecdotal ways we have already tried to guard our sense of Caribbean-ness more fiercely than those on the islands, as is normal for a diaspora and especially one that has often felt under attack. For example, Celine Dion, Garth Brooks, Michael Bolton and a whole host of ‘surprising’ singers are practically musical royalty in Jamaica, yet their popularity on the island has not transferred to the diaspora at all, we have instead focused more acutely and narrowly on Jamaican music. Why? I am going to call it cultural defensiveness; a tendency to cling onto one’s culture more fiercely when alienated from its source. I have seen a similar thing with heavy metal in India – it’s massively popular in India itself but barely registers with the Indian diaspora in the UK. I would also partly attribute this phenomenon to the racialised way in which music has been marketed in the UK but regardless, whatever the reasons, people ‘back home’ seem to feel a greater freedom to like ‘white stuff’, if that’s what appeals to them, without the same fears that they are trying to be something they are not.
In a similar culturally defensive vein, my uncle often tells me of his generation – he came here when he was four – becoming more Jamaican as they got older, re-learning and even faking Jamaican accents in response to the extreme social exclusion and racism of the 1970s. As Jamaican was the dominant black identity, people from other Caribbean islands and even from Africa itself would sometimes take on a Jamaican style, persona and accent. Despite the dominant depictions of the British state and media that focused almost exclusively on ‘Yardie gangsters’ – without any analysis of the Cold War geopolitics that brought those cocaine cowboys into being of course – my Jamaican heritage was a major source of pride and kudos among my peers growing up. Jamaican-influenced music was the dominant youth music and as black Brits we got a sort of ‘racial credit’ for the achievements of black America – it was assumed we were more in the know about RnB and hip hop and that we could relate to the black American ghetto experience in a way that others could not. Both these assumptions, it must
be said, were pretty much true. Almost all Caribbeans have cousins in New York and hip hop did indeed come into British society via Caribbean interpreters, in that our cousins in NY would send us the latest mix tapes and they’d be in Brixton or Tottenham markets days after they’d hit the streets of the Bronx or Brooklyn.
Before hip hop was mainstream, if non-black people wanted a slice of black American culture they often had to come to ‘the hood’ in the UK and get it; which gave black Brits a certain cultural capital. On top of this, Jamaicans in particular and black boys in general were assumed to be both tough and good at sports – this can be a blessing and a curse of course. Sometimes stereotypes put fear in your enemies and as a teenager that can be useful! On the other hand, if you are not six foot and ‘naturally’ athletic, as I was, the expectations to be tough, to run fast and to be a good rapper can be very damaging.
My relationship with and experience of my Scottish/English identity was a little more ambiguous. Even though I rarely saw my white grandparents, my maternal grandmother’s Scottish siblings did their best to keep in touch and I recall seeing some of them, particularly my aunt Mary, much more than my mother’s actual parents. My Scottish great-uncle Kenny had caught wind that I was interested in science, so the first time I met him he wrote out a list of all the things Scottish people had invented and gave it to me so that I could feel proud of my heritage. I must say, in the small amount of time I spent with my Scottish family us being black never felt like an issue. In fact, there was a subtle feeling that they disliked the English – including my granddad – far more than anybody brown! I would not want to generalise this experience, of course, but looking back now it did affect me a lot. My mum was able to set up her Scottish identity, in addition to her German one, in opposition to the ‘racist white English’.
