Empire: Kenyan Reparations and Apologising for History

by redosiris

There is a theory going round which is spread by commentators in the Daily Mail such as Melanie Phillips and education secretary Michael Gove that all children have been taught about the British Empire in the last 30 years has been that it was dreadful, abhorrent and cruel and that this needs redressing. Speaking as someone who spent their entire educational existence within the last 30 years I can say this is quite categorically untrue.

The impression I left school with after doing my GCSE’s was that the British went oversees out of a sense of benevolence to educate native peoples and build infrastructure out of nothing but sheer altruism. We rocked up in our friendly sailboats, taught the locals how to trade, gave them a railway, the English language, had a game of cricket and left of our own volition in the 1950s. Imagine my horror when, after doing some of my own research as an adult, I find that this rose-washed view was not entirely accurate.

The recent case of three Kenyans seeking reparations for their treatment at the hands of the British in Kenya in the 1950s is instructive of the point here; three people have won the right to sue the present British government for what happened to them decades ago (torture, maiming, castration in one case etc). Apologists for empire will try and make the case that these events were an aberration or the work of a few bad apples, the same way that each British or American soldier involved in atrocities in Iraq or Afghanistan is “one bad egg” etc – there are only so many times you can stomach this before you realise the Hen is laying bad eggs.

Arguments about bad apples are similar in one key way to the next argument about the present government or regime or administration not being held responsible for the sins of the past – both arguments require no action on the part of those commiting the crime. The trick we used to get soldiers to commit these acts will sound familiar, we called the freedom fighters battling against oppression and occupation “terrorists” who were a “threat” to our way of life, we subhumanised them and as a result treated them as sub-human. Nothing speaks louder to the squaddie than “we are the goodies, they are the baddies”, black and white – and its even easier when skin colours are such. We still use the same methods to convince people that murder in the interest of the state is the right thing to do. That is the first point about why this is relevant.

The second comes from answering why should David Cameron’s government be called to account for what Harold MacMillan’s government perpetrated? Sometimes perhaps it is correct for people to have the right to forget, the victims that is, but they decide that themselves. However these people have decided they want some restorative justice and the people closest to those who were to blame are the present government, to whom else can they turn for at the very least, acknowledgement of what was done to them and by whom? To get a measure of these specific crimes one need only be told the story of arch-imperliast Churchill being told the more grim details of the affair and immediately breaking down in tears. Far more important though, at least more generally, in the case of injustices during Empire is that this is still a live debate.

There are many politicians, social commentators as mentioned and bona-fide historians who would have the world believe the British Empire benevolence myth. They accept none of the seething mass of atrocities which were carried out in our names and cling to an every decreasing list of justifications for their inherent belief that the British are somehow “better” than native peoples and we were required to tame them and use their resources for our own benefit as they wouldn’t know what to do with all those raw materials anyway. The only negative of empire that people such as Niall Ferguson accept is that it ended, and the world would be a better place had it not done so.

For every reparations case that comes forward and every apology that can be squeezed out of the government it shines a welcome and important spotlight on the darker parts of empire. It keeps the knowledge that these weren’t the crimes of Wellington or Palmerston but were events carried out well within living memory. Specifically in this Kenyan case, the use of concentration camps when you would have thought that Nazi Germany would have done enough to consign them to the dustbin of history. That people are still trying to debate this without accepting the negative connotations to our empire is what makes cases such as this, and any apologies forthcoming more than relevant, they are required and many more of them before a great number of us can ever look at our flag with any sense of pride ever again.