[A-List] UK sub-imperialism: Africa & the rehabilitation of empire

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Barbarity is the inevitable consequence of foreign rule

Brown has gone further than Blair in the attempt to rehabilitate empire

Seumas Milne
Thursday January 27, 2005
The Guardian

Perhaps Gordon Brown is preparing for that day after the next general
election when Tony Blair is expected to offer him the choice of the Foreign
Office or the backbenches. Or maybe he just thinks that if he can't beat the
Blairites, he might as well join them. But the chancellor's declaration in
Africa that Britain should stop apologising for its colonial history must
give an unwelcome jolt to anyone hoping that a Brown government might step
back from the liberal imperialist swagger and wars of intervention that have
marked Blair's leadership. Far from being some heat-induced gaffe, his
latest imperial turn follows an earlier remark that we should be proud of
those who built the empire, which had been all about being "open,
outward-looking and international". Even Blair, who was prevailed on to cut
an "I am proud of the British empire" line from a speech during the 1997
election campaign, has never gone this far.

Apparently it is meant to be part of an attempt by the chancellor to carve
out a modern sense of British identity based around values of fair play,
freedom and tolerance. Quite what modernity and such values have to do with
the reality of empire might not be immediately obvious. But even more
bizarre is the implication that Britain is forever apologising for the
empire or the crimes committed under it. Nothing could be further from the
truth. There have been no apologies. Official Britain put decolonisation
behind it in a state of blissful amnesia, without the slightest effort to
come to terms with what had taken place. Indeed, there has barely been a
murmur of public reaction to Brown's extraordinary comments and what public
criticism there is of the British imperial record has increasingly been
drowned out by tub-thumping imperial apologias.

The rehabilitation of empire began in the early 1990s at the time of the
ill-fated US intervention in Somalia, used by maverick voices on both sides
of the Atlantic to float the idea of new colonies or UN trusteeships in
Africa. But in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, what had seemed a wacky
rightwing wheeze was taken up in Britain with increasing enthusiasm by
conservative popular historians like Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, as
the Sun and Mail cheered them on. The call for "a new kind of imperialism"
by Blair adviser (and now senior EU official) Robert Cooper brought this
reactionary retro chic into the political mainstream, and Brown's
endorsement of empire has now given it a powerful boost. The outraged
response to South African president Thabo Mbeki's recent denunciation of
Churchill and the empire for a "terrible legacy" was a measure of the
imperial torch-bearers' new confidence. The empire had brought "freedom and
justice", Roberts blithely informed the BBC.

It would be interesting to hear how Roberts - or Gordon Brown for that
matter - squares such grotesque claims with the latest research on the
large-scale, systematic atrocities carried out by British forces during the
Mau Mau rebellion in colonial Kenya during the 1950s: the 320,000 Kikuyu
held in concentration camps, the 1,090 hangings, the terrorisation of
villages, electric shocks, beatings and mass rape documented in Caroline
Elkins' new book, Britain's Gulag - and a death toll now thought to be over
100,000. This was a time when British soldiers were paid five shillings for
each African they killed, when they nailed the limbs of Kikuyu guerrillas to
crossroads posts and had themselves photographed with the heads of Malayan
"terrorists" in a war that cost 10,000 lives. Or more recently still, as
veterans described in the BBC Empire Warriors series, British soldiers
thrashed and tortured their way through Aden's Crater City - the details of
which one explained he couldn't go into because of the risk of war crimes
prosecutions. And all in the name of civilisation: the sense of continuity
with today's Iraq could not be clearer.

But it's not as if these end-of-empire episodes were isolated blemishes on a
glorious record of freedom and good governance. Britain's empire was built
on vast ethnic cleansing, enslavement, enforced racial hierarchy, land theft
and merciless exploitation. As the Cambridge historian Richard Drayton puts
it: "We hear a lot about the rule of law, incorruptible government and
economic progress - the reality was tyranny, oppression, poverty and the
unnecessary deaths of countless millions of human beings." Some empire
apologists like to claim that, however brutal the first phase may have been,
the 19th- and 20th-century story was one of liberty and economic progress.
But this is nonsense. In late 19th and early 20th century India - the jewel
of the imperial crown - up to 30 million died in famines as British
administrators insisted on the export of grain (as in Ireland), and courts
ordered 80,000 floggings a year; 4 million died in the avoidable Bengal
famine of 1943. There have been no such famines since independence.

Modern-day Bangladesh was one of the richest parts of the world before the
British arrived and deliberately destroyed its cotton industry. When India's
Andaman islands were devastated by the tsunami, who recalled that 80,000
political prisoners were held in camps there in the early 20th century and
routinely experimented on by British army doctors? Perhaps it's not
surprising that Hitler was an enthusiast, describing the British empire as
an "inestimable factor of value" even if, he added, it had been acquired
with "force and often brutality".

But there has been no serious attempt in Britain to face up to the record of
colonialism and the long-term impact on the societies it ruled - let alone
trials of elderly colonial administrators now living out their days in
Surrey retirement homes. Instead, the third in line to the throne thinks
it's a bit of a lark to go to a "colonials and natives" fancy dress party,
while the national curriculum has more or less struck the empire and its
crimes out of history. The standard GCSE modern world history textbook has
chapter after chapter on the world wars, the cold war, British and American
life, Stalin's terror and the monstrosities of Nazism - but scarcely a word
on the British and other European empires which carved up most of the world
between them, or the horrors they perpetrated.