Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
Way back in 1973, when I was a postgraduate student at Oxford, I fell out with my new best friend, Samantha. She was the daughter of a South African businessman and I had been exiled from Uganda.
Africa bonded us for a while, then things fell apart. She couldn’t understand why I went on and on about colonialism and its impact on the subjugated. And I couldn’t forgive her for not understanding. One day, opposite Blackwell’s bookshop, we finally parted after a particularly bruising row over Cecil Rhodes. To her, the racial supremacist and exploiter was an “incredible” pioneer. I, naturally, disagreed.
I wonder what dear Samantha makes of the campaign to pull down Rhodes from above the main entrance to Oriel College. Last week the Oxford Union – yes, that salubrious collective – voted to get rid of the statue. Good for them. Even if, after consultations, the hideous Rhodes stays up, his record is exposed. This furore has reawakened deep conflicts between anti-colonialism and jingoism.
A new survey found nearly 43 percent of Britons are proud of the British Empire. They hang on to these feelings because this nation has never gone through an honest assessment of that past. Though British rule did deliver some good, like all empires it was motivated by greed and cultural disrespect.
The 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon observed: “The history of empires is the history of human misery.” They who have assiduously painted over dark episodes in British history should know that whitewash is unreliable and temporary. Truths will out.
Back to the statue. Tories, academics, pundits and novelists – almost all from Oxbridge – are “outraged” by the campaign: this is censorship, an attempt to alter history, political correctness gone psychopathic. I remember no such indignation when the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down, or when post-Communist nations bulldozed the imposing figures of Lenin and Stalin from public squares. Would Rhodies be quite so ready to defend, say, a Nazi looking down on Oxford High Street? Of course not.
Here is a little-known story: Hitler loved the work of a German sculptor, Arno Breker, friend of Jean Cocteau, whose figures were often muscular, Aryan males. He became an official state artist. The Allies destroyed most of his public work after the end of the war. Was this also censorship and historical vandalism? Just last year, Jewish activists started a campaign to get rid of a sculpted horse that stands outside a school in Bavaria. The horse was made by Josef Thorak, another of Hitler’s favourite artists. Objectors have declared that they do not want “kids cavorting around a prancing Nazi horse”.
The British were keen to preserve Indian relics, but after the 1857 Indian uprisings, temple doors were kicked in and divine statues destroyed or stolen, to teach believers a lesson.
Ah, the many lessons we subjugated natives had to suffer through, amid the daily micro-humiliations of Western sup-remacy. The British banned home languages from playgrounds and spicy food in lunchboxes at our school; money spent on educating black children was a fraction of the funds made available for white kids in occupied lands. Just like in the UK, when the poor stole food, they were punished with extreme harshness. Resistance movements, like the Mau Mau in Kenya, had members tortured, imprisoned or killed.
Around 85 million Indian people died in famines between the years of 1760 and 1943, partly because of ruthless grain control policies. Churchill was unmoved when millions were perishing in Bengal. Indians, he thought, were “beastly people with a beastly religion”. They had no food because they bred like rabbits. There has not been a single deadly famine in India since independence. The Great Hedge of India(2001), by Roy Moxham, described a vast hedge that was built by Victorian administrators so they could collect salt tax. Impoverished Indians were no longer able to afford this essential. Many suffered illnesses as a result or died. What Rhodesians did to black people during this period remains hidden from British people. All they hear about is Mugabe, a monstrous product of colonialism, as was Idi Amin.
My last book, Exotic England, is both a critique of and a paean to my nation. I am here because they, imperialists, were there, in our lands. Though never equal, the relationship was not black and white. We learnt things, changed, fell in love sometimes. All of us have a responsibility to look honestly at this history, because so much of it lives on.
Oxford University is slowly getting more diverse, yet some 60 percent of black and Asian students reported having felt unwelcome in a survey last year because that institution still sees the world through Western eyes. Our education syllabus focuses on imperial vanities, not realities. The media and arts do not yet reflect modern, global Britain.
So too, our foreign policies remain colonial. Blair was proud of the empire, so too Brown. The British still own the Chagos archipelago. In the Seventies, inhabitants were forcibly removed from the islands by our government and the largest atoll, Diego Garcia, turned into a US military base. A report quietly published last week suggests 98 percent of the dispossessed Chagossians want to go back. They do not matter. This December, the UK is expected to extend US military occupation.
That is not to mention the unconsciously colonialist British culture. A travel supplement on South Africa in a Sunday paper featured happy pictures almost all of European travellers and commentators, plus two local ladies selling fruit and a vineyard worker – oh and a leopard, with black spots. Rhodes’s legacy continues. That is why the protest matters and why I back it totally.
l Alibhai-Brown is a Ugandan-born British journalist and author