The Empire Strikes Black

When Black Lives Matter moves from the US to the UK, it immediately becomes a debate on several levels: how contemporary attitudes to Black And Minority Ethnic communities (BAME) have been shaped by -in reverse order- immigration, the Atlantic Slave Trade, and the British Empire. It is so hard to disentangle these strands of history that I often wonder why we do it, not least when so many debates are generated by the wrong questions.

So here is what Boris Johnson said today, a week after the statue of slave trader Edward Colston was torn from its plinth in Bristol and dumped in the sea (since recovered); when Churchil's statue outside Parliament was (again!) daubed with graffiti; and sturdy Englishmen kept sentinel by the statue of Baden-Powell in Dorset, that pioneer of boy-love so concerned to 'nurture' them into men-

“We cannot now try to edit or censor our past,” he said. “We cannot pretend to have a different history. The statues in our cities and towns were put up by previous generations. They had different perspectives, different understandings of right and wrong. But those statues teach us about our past, with all its faults. To tear them down would be to lie about our history, and impoverish the education of generations to come.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics...y-george-floyd

But what Johnson failed to address, is the reasons why those statues were erected, often hundreds of years after the death of the men concerned, and what those 'perspectives' were -was slavery ever justifiable, even when it was, and by the Christian men and and women who later used the same theology to say it was not justified? The Gospels never changed in that time. And instead of telling lies about history by removing the statues, had not their erection itself been based on lies, intending to create lies about history? The statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond Virginia was erected in 1890 to commemorate his defence of Richmond -against whom? What is the truth about that defence, and the truth behind the war that required that defence?

If Lee is the hero, who is the villain?

Again, consider 'Clive of India', a man whom I assumed growing up in the UK was some sort of hero. Just days ago, the author of a recent book on the East India Company, pointed out-

"When Robert Clive, who established British rule in India, died by his own hand in 1774, he was widely reviled as one of the most hated men in England.
His body was buried in a secret night-time ceremony, in an unmarked grave, without a plaque. Clive left no suicide note, but Samuel Johnson reflected the widespread view as to his motives: Clive “had acquired his fortune by such crimes that his consciousness of them impelled him to cut his own throat”.
and
"That summer, a satire was published in London lampooning Clive as Lord Vulture, an unstable imperial harpy, “utterly deaf to every sentiment of justice and humanity… whose avarice knows no bounds”.

The points are important as 'we' struggle to make sense of Empire, and just as the critics of Empire become the focus of attack from an assortment of White Racists, Nationalists, and those convinced that the critique of Empire has the 'darker' purpose, to replace one 'race' with another, and one that not only dismisses Empire, but ultimately the fate of being White, Male, Heterosexual and Christian, as if such people were engaged in an existential struggle for survival -so, to Johnson's fears of the lies that change may create, Dalrymple poses a devastating truth about the British Empire in India-

"Indians, in particular, have bitter memories of British rule. In their eyes we came as looters, and subjected them to centuries of humiliation. The economic figures speak for themselves. In 1600, when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1.8% of the world’s GDP, while India was producing 22.5%. By the peak of the Raj, those figures had more or less been reversed: India was reduced from the world’s leading manufacturing nation to a symbol of famine and deprivation."
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...itish-imperial

The truth behind those statues is what we need to address, and perhaps in tearing them down we lose the opportunity to challenge the arguments that put them there, and in doing so, avoid the deeper question of what racism is, where it comes from, and how it may be defeated, and be replaced -but by what?

When the Empire Strikes Black, it is because not only was it never entirely White, but because without ithe Black there would have been no Empire. This moment cannot just be about addressing the wrongs of the past persisting into the present, but about the right way to re-write history, which we do every generation, and to replace atrophied blocks of marble with real people, but not as blocks of marble or stone, but living people with the same rights as 'us'; the Black people without whom Oxford Colleges would not exist with lavish endowments; the unknown slaves who made one man -James Penny- so rich they named a street in Liverpool after him, but a forgotten man only resurrected by a Beatles song.

Look around, and the very same symbols, the statues, the public buildings across the UK stand as a testament to the Industrial Revolution, and the Slavery and the Imperialism that paid for it. Why should we now deny to citizens with equal rights, an equal right to the history that was denied to them in the past, and the benefits which they have a right to claim now, because they made it happen? We own this history, all of it. Locked in there, is the vexing combination of joy and despair, of humanity and inhumanity -out of it we have emerged, divided and afraid, too afraid to change?

Stephen Daedaus, strolling on Sandymount Strand south of Dublin on the coast, ponders the great questions-

"Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read", but adds, moments later-

"I am gettting on nicely in the dark'.

Can we carry on, more comfortable in the dark, or can we emerge into the light of a new day with new horizons? I would like to think we can, but Brexit often sounds like a nostalgia project, determined to resurrect an England before immigration -and for that reason alone, doomed to fail (sorry, Boris!), just as one wonders if America can change when in the aftermath of the massacres at Sandy Hook -nothing changed.

Someone must be having some kind of 'fun' trawling through the back-catalogue of Boris Johnson's articles for The Spectator and other pubications. In line with the theme of this thread, here is the Prime Minister, re-writing history for the benefit of those convinced that since 'we' left Africa, the place has gone downhill. Small note- when Johnson waxes lyrical about Uganda, I assume he wants the Ugandans to remain in their beautiful country -and not come to the UK to live.

"Boris Johnson said colonialism in Africa should never have ended and downplayed Britain’s role in the slave trade, an article written by the prime minister while he was a Tory MP reveals.
Critics are urging Mr Johnson to explain whether he still holds the views expounded in the 2002 piece, where he argued that Africans would not have grown the right crops for export without British direction.
“The continent may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience,” he wrote. “The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more.”
"Consider Uganda, pearl of Africa, as an example of the British record. Are we guilty of slavery? Pshaw. It was one of the first duties of Frederick Lugard, who colonised Buganda in the 1890s, to take on and defeat the Arab slavers,” Mr Johnson says in the piece.
“And don’t swallow any of that nonsense about how we planted the ‘wrong crops’. Uganda teems, sprouts, bursts with vegetation. You will find fruits rare and strange, like the jackfruit, hanging bigger than your head and covered with green tetrahedral nodules. Though delicately perfumed, it is, alas, more or less disgusting, and not even Waitrose is pretentious enough to stock it.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...-a9564541.html

We, and they. The defining mechanism of racism throughout the world. Never Us.

The so-called debate on Rhodes Must Fall has entered a strange world of denial, courtesy of the Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology in Oxford, Nigel Biggar. He and others in the University are going to lobby the Govt to prevent the statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oriel College from being removed, ie 'Rhodes Must Not Fall'.

The key issue is this statement by Biggar on Rhodes:

""He was an imperialist, but British colonialism was not essentially racist, wasn't essentially exploitative, and wasn't essentially atrocious. So the fact that Rhodes was a supporter of the British Empire as a modernising force for good doesn't damn him."
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/rhodes-mus...223803781.html

Imperialism is based on and shaped by ideas of race that privilege White People, indeed Colonialism was the physical fact that White People had the right to invade African countries and exploit their natural wealth, and install themselves on the land, because the African was an inferior species of human, if indeed they were considered human in the 19th century; the violence that attended the creation of the British Empire in Africa is still not fully documented (re ZImbabwe as in Beinart's article linked below), but was extensive at every level. And the greatest benefit of African imperialism and colonialism for Rhodes was money and power.

William Beinart (South African born) has written a long and detailed, but important argument for removing the Rhoes statue to a museum, and is linked here-

https://www.africanstudies.ox.ac.uk/...laimbeinartpdf