When one time burglar and sometime Rastafarian poet
Benjamin Zephaniah turned
down the OBE he had been offered, he claimed he did so largely on
account of British involvement in the slave trade, and by so doing, the
pompous poet he exposed an hypocrisy which few members of the
sycophantic media thought to call him on. As a Jamaican, Mr Zephaniah
may be able to trace his family back to British owned slaves some two
hundred years ago, but as a
Rastafarian
he acknowledges as godlike The Emperor Haile Selassie and the land of
Ethiopia where, as a direct result of not being part of any European
Empire, the ownership of slaves was still legal, and an estimated 2
million people lived as
slaves within living memory.
As
I detailed in an earlier article, Britain and her Empire had a greater
role than any other in bringing about the end of slavery in most of the
world. Whereas, in Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, the black messiah of the
Rastafarian faith, did not get around to ending slavery in the
Rastafarian holy land of Ethiopia until 1932, and even then the
“Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of Kings of Ethiopia and
Elect of God”
was less motivated by the humanitarian zeal which drove the British
abolitionists, but by the somewhat more practical consideration that the
league of nations would not let him join if he didn't.
Benny
Z may not like the fact, but to be a Rastafarian unless you are
extremely stupid, or you have to accept that Africans owned Africans in
Addis Ababa, not centuries ago but around the same time as your
grandmother was trying on her first pair of T-strap pumps.
To be
fair to Zephaniah he may have been lucky that most of the media was too
politically correct to ask him how he reconciled rejecting a nation
which produced the great abolitionists, and who's navy pursued and
attacked slave traders. whilst revering a nation where slaves were
openly owned less than 80 years ago, given that the only credible
answers were likely to expose a level of instinctive racism which the
left like to pretend only exists in reverse.
Of course, when that
notoriously racist old hack,Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, proved yet again that
the band wagon has not yet started rolling on which she would not be
amongst the first to plant her ample haunches, and followed Zephjaniah's
lead and
sent her own medal back, it became clear not much truth was likely to be told about Britain's imperial past.
That
brings us to the question, what is the truth about Empire, is it, as
the Zephjaniahs and Alibhai-Browns would have us believe, a reason for
feelings of shame and (white) guilt? or, as our grandfather's generation
believed, a source of considerable national and patriotic pride? It may
not surprise you to know that I have no plans to join Benny and Yasmin
on their ramshackle, and heavily painted, bandwagon.
Ours was the
greatest empire the world has ever know, it covered a quarter of the
Earth's surface, an area which included almost every time zone and over
which, as was famously, and often, said the sun never set. However, the
Empire's greatness was not only in its size, for, although many
politicians, media pundits, and almost all of the agenda driven
Marxists, who teach our children would rather die than admit it, it was
also one of the most benevolent forces for good in the history of
mankind.
Of course it is impossible to ignore the commercial
incentives for empire, and it would be disingenuous to deny that we did
not briefly join the rest of the in trading slaves, (and, unlike out
current national projects , back then we did such things quite efficiently) or indeed the
opium trade
as a result of which we ended up owning Hong Kong for over 150 years.
However, it is also impossible to entirely separate the humanitarian
motives from the commercial, certainly after the banning of the slave
trade in 1807 leading up to Abolition in the 1830s and then the so
called
scramble for Africa humanitarianism was a major driving force.
I don't agree with everything
John Derbyshire says but but he can sometimes produce some very prescient comments and, to quote from one of his various
essays on the British Empire
“When
the Empire got properly into its stride, humanitarianism was a major
driving force. Slavery was abolished throughout Britain's possessions in
1834, and much of the work of the Royal Navy through the middle decades
of the 19th century was devoted to the suppression of slave trafficking
by peoples of other nations- including this one (the USA). The British
colony of Sierra Leone was founded as a refuge for freed slaves, a dozen
years before Liberia. The drive to eliminate slavery was fueled by
evangelical Christianity, which, in the form of missionary activity,
continued to be an important element of the imperial thrust well into
the 20th century, especially in Africa.”Given the bizarre
morality and values of our time there are some who try to suggest that
very “Christian Missionary zeal” itself was a form of racism or imperial
oppression cruelly suppressing local customs and traditions. However,
that is all part of that doctrine which seeks find malevolence in all
things western, and which attack western style Christianity for no
better reason than that it is Western. Furthermore, although I believe
passionately in the preservation of various ethnic cultures, I refuse to
accept there is a moral equivalence between Christianity and those
local customs such as
Sati muti thuggee and female
genital mutilation
which were amongst the traditional which were suppressed. Neither do I
feel that we should feel guilt for the fact that by suppressing them,
countless thousands were spared the suffering they would otherwise have
endured. (albeit in the case of muti and female mutilation, the victims
were only spared until we left.)
Furthermore, before attacking
Christianity, the proponents of white guilt should not forget that some
of the most passionate and devout Christians are black Africans, a group
they tend to avoid offending whenever possible.
This is not to deny that some horrors did occur during the four and a half centuries between the day Henry V11 sent
John Cabot off to kind a new route to India, and Harold MacMillan's infamous and self serving “
Wind of Change”
speech in 1960. However, these were true “isolated incidents” usually
involving single rogue individuals or nervous young soldiers firing upon
aggressive crowds. Furthermore, even the worst outrages, such as the
Amritsar
(or Jallianwala Bagh) massacre although inexcusable, were extremely
rare and resulted in a death toll roughly equivalent to bad 48 hours in
Iraq.
Contrary to the anti British propaganda taught in out
schools, there was nothing remotely approaching the brutality of other
empires, such as the
Ottoman empire, let alone the type of officially sanctioned genocide which characterised the great communist empires such as
Russia and
China regimes so close to the hearts of so many in today's UAF, or certainly their fathers.
In
fact the only real example any major atrocity committed by imperial
Britain was against the white tribe of Southern Africa, during the
Boer war.
How odd then that nobody is urging us to accept white Boer asylum
seekers as recompense for how badly our great grandparents treated them,
despite how desperate their current
situation is becoming.
A
common accusation against the British is that we “plundered” other
countries, however it is surely a strangely British form of plundering,
where a world power moves into a country which has no infrastructure, is
without health cover, without law, without education, and with a
dismally low life expectancy, and, without exception left them with a
world renowned system of law, a healthy and educated population, a 20th
Century infrastructure, together with functioning industry and
agricultural systems enabling them to be potentially self supporting.
The fact that the Infrastructure has been destroyed, agriculture
devastated and the industrial wealth pillaged, does not change the fact
that it was bequeathed to our colonial subjects when we left them.
To quote John Derbyshire again
“The
British Empire was, in fact, for all its faults and occasional horrors,
a net force for good. I cannot think of any place that Britain left
worse- less healthy, less prosperous, less well-educated-than she found
it.”That is the truth, not the huge lie now being told to
excuse what some ex-colonies have done to their inheritance particularly
in Africa, that Colonialism, especially British colonialism was the
cause of the dire situations in which some ex-colonial countries now
find themselves. A calumny which is easily exposed as the lie it is.
Firstly
it is disproved by the fact that it is primarily only the Africa
colonies which are suffering, whereas many of those in Asia are booming,
India for instance, looks set to become one of the major economies in
the 21st Century. The Asians, for all their faults, took what we left
them, ran with it and may soon overtake us. Of course, as older readers
may have noticed, the advocates of white guilt focus almost exclusively
on Africa these days, whilst ignoring the successful ex-colonies in
Asia, like India and especially Hong Kong, which as a British
protectorate became one the premier financial centres in the world, and
remains so over a decade into Chinese rule.
However, if Africa is
what our critics want to focus on, I'll take the challenge, lets look
to Africa, including those African states such as Ethiopia and
Liberia
which were never colonised by any European power, are they any better
off? ..er..nope! in many ways they are in a worse state than their
ex-colonial neighbours.
The tragedy of Africa does not have its
roots in Colonialism, indeed you only need to watch as their situations
get worse the further they are away from British rule, to see the real
causes of Africa's plight. Far from oppressing the people of Africa,
Colonial rule may well have been their brief day in the sun, and a day
which is sadly over.
There is no comparison between the
Kenya we left in 1964 or the
Rhodesia before it handed over to Mugabbe in 1980, and the corrupt, crime ridden mega slums they became within a generation of our
departure.
Today the average African
earns less
than they did 50 years ago, when still living under under alleged their
cruel white oppressors, life expectancy is plummeting (not only due to
AIDS) their infrastructure is crumbling around them, and as we have seen
recently in Kenya,
tribal violence,
which, apart from a brief reappearance during the Mau Mau outrages of
the 1950's (long portrayed by our media a a liberation struggle but
essentially tribal), had been long suppressed is making a reappearance.
Journalists
from the Independent, the Guardian or the New York Times may faint at
the suggestion, but it is becoming progressively more common to hear
Africans state openly that life was better of under Colonial rule, even
the current South African President's brother
Moeletsi Mbeki recently admitted that “The average African is worse off now than during the colonial era”and he is certainly
not alone So, tell me again, just why are we supposed to feel guilty?
The nation which played that major and
pivotal role
in ending the slave trade, not only in the North Atlantic but also
driving out the Arab slave traders which had previously plagued Africa
and Asia for thousands of years, is, instead of taking well deserved
credit for that great achievement, expected to accept primary
responsibility for the evils of slavery?
A country which spread
law, education, health care and civilization to a quarter of the Earth's
population is supposed to feel guilty for oppressing those we were
educating, protecting and healing?
A people who built gleaming,
20th century cities, which would stand proud in the centre of Europe, in
the African bush and bequeathed them together with fully functional
infrastructures and thriving economies to people who have shown
themselves
incapable of maintaining what
was handed to them, let alone building for themselves, are required to
meekly accept the allegation that we plundered those countries which we
left in so much better condition than that which we found them in?
I think not.
In
our schools, two generations of our children have been taught lies by
politically motivated liars, whilst our media, our politicians and
agenda driven historians
present us with a entirely fictionalised version of our history. Yet,
the myths behind white guilt, certainly as they apply to Great Britain,
do not stand up against even the most cursory of of analysis, in terms
of our Imperial past we have very little to feel guilty about.
It
is not jingoistic to state that, as a people, we the British have
created more good in this world and done more for the benefit of mankind
than almost any of the races with whom we share this planet, it is a
truth and one easily supported by the facts. Any honest, and unbiased
study of our history and our empire, far from justifying guilt, should
be the source of tremendous national pride.