Priyamvada Gopal | ukwatch.net

Mugabe, Britain and the Abuses of Anti-Colonialism

eddie — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 15:28:33 +0000

Over forty years ago, as Africa commenced the long and arduous process of decolonization, one of its foremost liberationist thinkers issued a prophetic warning. Frantz Fanon, himself a freedom fighter, wrote that the national leader in the postcolonial era should not ‘fall back into the past and become drunk on the remembrance of the epoch leading up to independence.’ His powerful descriptions of a once effective leader who gradually secedes from reality and betrays the people who entrust him with their future has resonances for the tragic situation in which Zimbabwe finds itself today. Having reduced a once significant anti-colonialism to a self-serving dogma, Robert Mugabe is the kind of fallen leader Fanon cautioned Africa against. Hesitant African leaders who are being called upon to intervene might want to reread his classic essay, ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ from that classic liberationist text, The Wretched of the Earth,

As Zimbabwe spirals into further political chaos, Mugabe and his party’s addiction to power will further indulge an equally self-serving Western appetite for spectacles of Third World despotism. If Mugabe finds it convenient to invoke the demon of colonial oppression (which many Zimbabweans, barely thirty years out of colonial rule, remember all too well), he also enables British politicians to spout pieties condemning violence while their own nation is currently implicated in two dubious and bloody wars. Were the BBC and Channel 4 to show as many close-ups of injured and dead Iraqis as they do of Mugabe’s maimed victims, criticism of violence against innocents might be somewhat more evenly distributed than it currently is. The British government turns accusatory fingers in Zimbabwe’s direction while Mugabe shouts back anti-colonial slogans. It is a perfect symbiosis, a mutually convenient embrace of denunciation, with each party laying claim to the higher moral ground. The only innocents, however, are ordinary Zimbabweans.

Both Mugabe and Britain are guilty of avoiding historical truths in favour of a skewed story which legitimates their own position. Britain’s persistent refusal to acknowledge its own colonial legacies is contradictory. It reneged on its commitments to the land reform programme claiming, in Claire Short’s words, that there were no ‘links to former colonial interests’ while nevertheless concerning itself with the fate of the white farmers who represent these interests. Alongside an extremely selective use of human rights discourse, such contradictions mean that Mugabe’s denunciations have some truth to them even if their main purpose is to detract from the ruling elite’s own depravities. While Africa is ostensibly central to Britain’s international development agenda, the emphasis has always been on the paternalism of aid rather than acknowledging and making reparations for the economic devastation wrought by colonialism. Rarely do condemnations of land seizure, violence and intimidation extend back to the time Matabeleland came under British rule. This too was accompanied by the seizure of vast swathes of fertile land by a handful of British farmers while large numbers of Ndebele and Shona people were killed or forced into labour. Brutal modern regimes in that part of the globe didn’t begin with Mugabe.

Mugabe, meanwhile, should also reacquaint himself with the original aims of anti-colonialism and the people’s expectations of the liberation struggle in Zimbabwe. Having resisted the anti-poor agendas of international monetary institutions and initiated necessary land reforms, the Zimbabwean leader has also refused all responsibility for those many failures of his rule not reducible solely to the colonial past. A once dynamic band of freedom fighters have degenerated into a party who brandish their liberationist laurels while they subjugate, starve and brutalize an entire population in the name of anti-colonialism. The sanctions imposed by the West have, as they usually do in such cases, strengthened Mugabe’s brutish hold on power and further harmed the vulnerable. Real anti-colonialists like Fanon and Gandhi both insisted that that freedom was not about replacing the white tyrant with the brown or black one. Mugabe is the exemplary cautionary tale here, a freedom fighter who has essentially recolonized his people. Indeed, the very techniques of suppression and intimidation which the Zimbabwean leader whereas Mugabe has essentially recolonized his people. Indeed, the very techniques of suppression and intimidation deployed by the Zimbabwean leader, a knight of the British Empire until yesterday were taught to him by the colonial masters he professes to despise. Censorship, brutal suppression of resistance and the dismissal of any form of criticism as seditious were all part of the colonial arsenal. Quick to claim credit for spreading parliamentary democracy, Britain is less forthcoming about acknowledging the legacy of authoritarian rule also left behind by its empire.

Frantz Fanon died young, but one can imagine what he might have to say to his fellow former liberationist. Mr Mugabe, it is time for you to return the power which the Zimbabwean people once vested in you but which they now legitimately wish to reclaim. Liberate them from the tyranny of the rule you have exercised for too long and without a continuing mandate. Your actions weaken all of us who hold the accomplishments of liberation dear and only strengthen the hypocrisies of former colonial powers. The great tradition of African anti-colonialism to which you constantly refer has never been about blaming the colonizer alone; it has always taken account of the culpability and responsibilities of African leaders and elites.

As for those in Britain, it is time for the ‘proper analysis’ some commentators have called for, one which would include honest reflections on the imperial legacy rather than ‘shutting up’ because of colonial guilt. It is the only way to deprive Mugabe of his main moral weapon.This is not just about the kind of simple-minded ‘balance’ which the BBC generally advocates (though it has long since abandoned that value with regard to Zimbabwe), but also an informed sense of how history shapes the present. Failing this, Zimbabwe and the rest of us are destined to asphyxiate ourselves in what Fanon aptly termed ‘the tragic lie’ of the aftermath of colonialism.

This is an extended version of an article published in the Guardian which can be found
here

A shameful silence

JamieSW — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 18:57:45 +0000

We have become accustomed to theatrical displays of intolerance: death threats against writers, bonfires of novels, plays shut down, vandals defacing paintings. The danger, however, is that this obscures the more insidious forms that the suppression of dissent can take.

Announcing that the proposed boycott of links with Israeli universities would be illegal, the University and College Union asserted that debates related to the topic under its auspices would also be “unlawful”. On the basis of last week’s legal opinion (the details of which remain shrouded in mystery), the union’s leadership has summarily cancelled public debates to have been attended by “legitimate representatives of organisations from both Israel and Palestine”. Scheduled for a national tour this autumn, the carefully balanced debates had been described by the union leadership itself as a “sensible basis” on which to approach the divisive issue. As such, they were supported by many of us who, while condemning the abuse of Palestinian human rights by the Israeli state, questioned the ethical and strategic merits of a boycott. Now all engagement on the issue is off the table.

Some argue that this fractious union would do better to focus on domestic matters, after the ignominious end to last year’s action for better pay. Academics, however, can’t afford to ignore this appalling attempt to undermine that most fundamental intellectual value – free debate. How, in an apparently democratic context, can it be “unlawful” to discuss an issue or possible action? Are discussions of economic sanctions against, say, Burma illegal? What about sanctions against Hamas-led Palestine? It is a particular travesty when such a blatant attack on civil rights comes from the very organisation members expect would defend them were they to be harassed for their scholarly opinions.

The move comes at a time when academic freedom cannot be taken for granted. In the US, it is under increasing assault from within and outside academia. Even as freedom of speech is invoked as the great western value to be spread across the globe, by force if necessary, its limits are marked by two unbreachable taboos: anti-Americanism, and criticism of the Israeli state and its occupation of Palestine. Organisations such as Campus Watch monitor what academics write and teach, compile blacklists and attempt to shut down debate, despite their claim to support free speech. Respected scholars who have faced campaigns include Columbia University’s Middle East specialist Joseph Massad, who was accused and then cleared of anti-semitism; outspoken Michigan professor Juan Cole; and Norman Finkelstein, refused tenure and forced to resign after DePaul University came under external pressure. Most recently, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was banned by the University of St Thomas in Minnesota because of his stance on Israel/Palestine.

Dissenting Jewish academics are themselves the target of what Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer call “the Israel lobby”. These authors, by no means anti-American radicals, came under fire simply for attempting to open discussion on US-Israel relations.

Though encomiums to free speech underpin displays of civilisational superiority by America and other western polities, it is undermined in practice by flagrant breaches of academic integrity and protocol. It is impossible to imagine a white European or American head of state, even an authoritarian such as Putin, being described in the demeaning way that the Columbia University president Lee Bollinger introduced Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – as “a petty and cruel dictator”. The same Bollinger was president when the investigation of Massad and other scholars took place. There is no excuse for inviting an elected leader to talk at your university only to undermine him as lacking in “intellectual courage” before he has had a chance to speak. It’s called a set-up.

The UCU leadership’s call for constructive engagement over a divisive boycott is looking like a set-up, too. Sadly, the pressure exerted by people identified as part of the Israel lobby – including the Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who is quick to denounce criticism of Israeli policy as anti-semitic (never mind if it comes from Jewish intellectuals as well) – has succeeded in shutting down discussion, let alone criticism, of the Palestinians. Is silence the only constructive approach to the Palestinian question?

Writers and intellectuals have a moral obligation to criticise violations of human rights and freedom wherever they occur – Iran, Zimbabwe, Burma, Guantánamo or South Africa. The military occupation of Palestine should be no exception. Whatever their views on boycotts, academics must not allow such persistent exceptionalism to suppress debate in an organisation expected to defend, not undermine, their right to freedom of speech and engagement.

Condemning Slavery, Celebrating Empire

Alex Doherty — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 12:17:11 +0000

Why, demanded Jeremy Paxman recently, should he feel “guilty” about the slave trade, given that he wasn’t alive then and that his “ancestors were peasants”? He is not alone in asking this question. Many Britons wonder, not unreasonably, why and how they should “apologise” for a crime they did not physically perpetrate.

Though driven by an honourable impulse, campaigners dressed up in instruments of bondage are in danger of reducing the complicated project of reckoning with history into a facile confessional moment. (“So Sorry” T-shirts are uncomfortably close to pastiche.) Similarly, the theological mode of “atonement” which defined the high-profile service at Westminster Abbey last week (challenged by a lone protester, Toyin Agbetu), might actually undermine the case for facing up to the past squarely.

Atonement-speak obscures the distinction between “guilt” – a private, often religious emotion connected to personal wrongdoing – and a more demanding and necessary move: acknowledging that our lives are shaped by historical processes through which we have accrued benefits at the expense of others. As the service itself demonstrated, the atonement mode of acknowledging the past comes complete with built-in absolution, a rhetorical clean chit that you can give yourself without further consideration of how the past lives on in the present, and how you might redress material inequities inherited from that time.

This dual mode of atonement and celebration is also profoundly self-regarding, reinforcing the idea that white Christian Britons are the main agents of moral sensibility, courage and historical transformation. We are told by, among others, Bishop Nazir Ali – who routinely plays the role of loyal defender of the White Man’s Burden – that Britain should be remembered not for its part in slavery but for its role in ending the trade. Apparently we shouldn’t feel responsibility for the past but are allowed, indeed exhorted, to feel pride in it. We are to distance ourselves from those who actively participated in slavery, but we can rightfully claim an abolitionist lineage.

No one can deny that Britain, like other cultures, has great traditions of courageous activism, but to cast this bicentennial year largely as a “celebration” of white abolitionists once again marginalises others to whom this history also belongs. Ali opines that it was specifically Christian beliefs that brought about the end of slavery. While Christianity, like other religions, has a subversive side to it, the bishop might recall that evangelical Christianity was also used as justification for enslaving or colonising those regarded as heathen.

This commemorative year is shaped by a contradiction: it emerges at a time when we are being enjoined to celebrate the legacies of the British empire and “British values”. But recalling slavery renders this a somewhat fraught process. The solution is to separate slavery from empire, and to emphasise the ending of the slave trade rather than the continuation of exploitation by other means. Conveniently excised from this account is not only the fierce resistance put up by the enslaved and the colonised, but also the fact that 1807 did not mark the end either of slavery itself or of the exploitation of cheap labour.

Following formal emancipation in 1838 and appeals by owners, the sugar plantations of the Caribbean were productively worked by government-approved schemes of indentured labour – a form of debt bondage involving deception, pitiful wages, arduous and often fatal journeys, harsh working conditions, confinement, physical abuse and, in most cases, no promised return to the homeland. This is how millions of “coolies” – Indian and Chinese labourers – arrived in the Caribbean and parts of Africa. The history of slavery is inseparable from the history of empire: it is contradictory to celebrate the latter while claiming to condemn the former.

We know that government and politicians stop short of a full apology because they are aware of legal implications that would strengthen the case for reparations. Moreover, reparations themselves would force us to face up to the fact that the horrors of the past were not merely momentary lapses of moral judgment that can be redeemed through public enactments of remorse. They were systematic projects of national self-enrichment at the expense of other societies. A clear acknowledgement of this fact would deprive Britain of the cherished historical mantle of the “moral empire”, the coloniser with a benevolent mission. Indeed, the argument that Britain would stamp out slavery was frequently invoked to make the moral case for colonising Africa.

When Anthony Gifford made an eloquent case for reparations in the Lords, objectors argued that Britain already does much to “help” African countries. To pay reparations would be to acknowledge that you are not so much moral beacon and “rescuer” as culpable party. It would mean conceding the obvious: that in economic terms, it is the “developed” world that is indebted to the “developing” world. But the powerful moral and strategic position of being creditor and benevolent dispenser of aid is too useful for Britain and other western nations to give up. A real apology would involve not only the cancellation of so-called “third world debt”, itself the consequence of colonial depredation, but also some form of reparations (including relabelling “aid” as such).

Given that slavery and indentured labour were part of a philosophy of exploitative profit-making which the writer Barry Unsworth critically calls “sacred hunger”, we might also use this commemorative year to ask ourselves to what extent our lifestyles continue to appease this appetite. Profiting from cheap labour is far from a thing of the past: witness the continuing movement of large corporations to poor countries where they can pay low wages in abusive working conditions.

Such self-critical reflections apply to descendants of the enslaved and the colonised as well. The Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid reminds her fellow descendants of slaves to reflect on “who captured and delivered [their ancestors] to the European master”, and the ways in which such betrayals persist in their own societies. She calls for a “more demanding relationship” to the past, where we ask ourselves how we got to where we are and why we live the way we do.

These are more productive questions than the narcissistic binaries of “shame/guilt” versus “pride/celebration” which lead to contortions such as Martin Kettle’s suggestion on these pages that, shameful horrors aside, slavery, genocide and colonialism were part of historical processes that were “to the net benefit of humankind”. (Unless, of course, one defines humankind as essentially European.) Undertaking the challenge of answering Kincaid’s questions might be the best form of unifying homage we can pay to all those who have questioned, resisted and triumphed before us.

Priyamvada Gopal teaches in the English faculty at Cambridge University and is the author of Literary Radicalism in India.

pg268@cam.ac.uk

Race and the Use of Force

Alex Doherty — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 13:12:36 +0000

It’s a risky business, living in an age dominated by iconic images. The burning towers tumbling down, the hostage pleading for his life, the defiantly veiled woman, the little Iraqi boy with his arms blown off, the twisted metal of bombed train carriages. Each image has its own unique context and yet influences how we read other images. We knot images together to tell perilous stories of our time. Sixteen years after an amateur video of a black man being beaten by cops in Los Angeles flickered across our television screens and triggered terrible riots, we recalled the images vividly as we saw CCTV footage last week of a slight black woman surrounded by four burly men and a police dog straining at its leash, being hammered into the ground by blow after blow.

This time the story – featured mainly in this newspaper and in a BBC Newsnight report – was studiously cold-shouldered by most of the mainstream media. Petty crime or terrorism, went the consensus, the police had to get on with the job. Only sensationalists would compare this beating to the infamous Rodney King episode or the 1997 California shooting of Tyisha Miller, a black woman sitting unconscious in her car. A swift burial of the story took place, although the incident itself has gone on to the Independent Police Complaints Commission for investigation.
We can agree that behind each image lies a unique story, and that Rodney King in 1991 and Toni Comer in 2006 should not be folded into the same narrative. We can acknowledge that police officers work in a dangerous job in difficult times and must be in a position to ensure their own safety and that of others. Not every picture of a white police officer forcefully apprehending a black suspect, even one as fragile as Comer, is an iconic image of racism. Indeed, Comer, who was 19 at the time of the incident last July, has herself steadfastly refused to play the so-called race card, and her complaint to the IPCC is of excessive force, not racism. She is not speaking as a “black woman”.

Still, it remains difficult to imagine a petite middle-class white woman being beaten like this, or that so shocking an image would be played down by the media. Iconic pictures of white women tend to tell stories of victimisation by vicious crime (Abigail Witchalls) or capture-and-rescue (the photogenic Jessica Lynch, not Shoshana Johnson, the black woman soldier also taken captive in Iraq). When the pictures from Abu Ghraib emerged, the shock of seeing a white woman engaged in torture was diffused by a spurious class logic that dismissed Lynndie England as “white trash”.

Ms Comer was drunk, disorderly and culpable of criminal damage. She was also committing that unpardonable female offence, “ball-busting”, as she resisted arrest. Perhaps a guy, whether rapist or policeman, has gotta do what a guy’s gotta do, including dragging this young woman to the police van with her trousers around her knees, while she, an epilepsy sufferer, flails and foams at the mouth. It is entirely possible, meanwhile, that PC Anthony Mulhall was, in fact, using “approved techniques” and “reasonable force”.

Perhaps this is why the image disturbs us. Or ought to. For it is not only that we live in a time when blacks and Asians constitute a disproportionate chunk of the prison population and continue to be criminalised. Or that institutionalised racism in the police has been acknowledged. Perhaps what should really worry us is that we live in a time when the very definition of what constitutes “reasonable” force is expanding rapidly. And that it is taking more and more people into the ambit of gratuitous violence. What might once have been clandestine, off-camera activity, is now rapidly becoming part of the public and the ordinary. Asymmetry – the many against the few, the strong against the weak, the armed against the unarmed – is gaining legitimacy as the norm. In an international frame, it even has a name: “shock and awe”.

It is now “reasonable” use of force to shoot an unarmed “Asian-looking” man at an underground station on suspicion. It is reasonable to bomb an entire nation “into the Middle Ages” for harbouring an elusive criminal, for kidnapping a soldier, or on suspicion of possessing weapons of mass destruction; even more reasonable to spend £20bn of public money to refurbish Britain’s own WMD arsenal to deter an unspecified future enemy. It is reasonable, as the Baha Mousa case suggests, for the armed forces in Iraq to punch and kick civilians to death, resurrecting stress positions outlawed 35 years ago.

Our desperate times are marked by constant redefinitions of the reasonable and the acceptable. So new police powers are sought and many granted – shoot to kill, detention without charge and sweeping powers of arrest – while crime itself becomes an endlessly elastic category, from the Asbo to prohibitions on “incitement” and “offence”. At home, it is those at the bottom or the social ladder, the most easily disenfranchised – black people, the poor, migrants, Muslim communities – who will feel the brunt of the expansion of state powers, or “approved techniques” of force. Abroad it will be a deemed “rogue” state, the international equivalent of an Asbo, a nation likely to be populated by black or brown people but with uppity aspirations to joining the nuclear club. Only the US and Europe, like nice white middle-class people, can be trusted to keep their cool and exercise the most reasonable force at all times. Challenge this and you can expect an equal opportunity thumping.

The pictures from Abu Ghraib disturbed us because they epitomise the moral terrors of asymmetry: the unarmed captive made to crawl naked watched by snarling dogs and laughing soldiers, subjected to all manner of physical and sexual abuse. Then we were told that what we were witnessing was the exception, the work of a few bad apples. We might yet be given the tale of a rogue cop who is the exception to the Sheffield rule. This is the myth we need to question. What should frighten us is not the isolated image and its unique circumstances but the larger story it tells of what has become so acceptable that it is not even newsworthy.

Poor black, Asian and white communities have no stake in defending guns, petty crime, or alcohol and drug abuse in their midst. Indeed, it is they who suffer most directly from the harmful effects of these things and the violence they spawn. But demonising those at the bottom of the lengthening social ladder while the state expands its exercise of force is hardly the answer. What we are witnessing, at home and abroad, is increasing toughness on crimes, real and imagined, with a constant exacerbation of its conditions and causes. We can look away from that CCTV footage now, but don’t be shocked or surprised next time some guy gets shot in the underground by an excitable cop, or we help bomb another nation into oblivion. It’s all about the exercise of reasonable force.

Priyamvada Gopal teaches in the English faculty at Cambridge University and is the author of Literary Radicalism in India.

pg268@cam.ac.uk

Anti-Racism as a Facile Game

Alex Doherty — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 12:35:08 +0000

A penitent Jade Goody is off to India to beg forgiveness for the remarks she made on Celebrity Big Brother, if yesterday’s reports are to be believed. But neither that, nor her tearful eviction and encounter with a stern Davina McCall, nor the weight of media condemnation, is a triumph for anti-racism. But it does tell us something about the trivialising of politics and narrowing of political consciousness. What has triumphed is an anaemic political correctness that will eventually undermine real anti-racist work.

The offensive remarks made on Big Brother certainly reeked of playground racism and xenophobia. During my teenage years an English friend insisted that I smelled of curry. Perhaps I did and still do. It’s a rare Asian kid that hasn’t experienced some form of juvenile nastiness and worse. Repeatedly referring to someone as “the Indian” dehumanises them. Shilpa “Fuckawallah” is not the innocent concoction of someone straining to recall a surname. It stems from the complacent carelessness of an ethnic majority than doesn’t need to learn anything about the minorities in its midst. Many of us routinely deal with variants of such behaviour in our daily lives.

For British Asians, the public display of familiar battles poked at raw wounds, inspiring large numbers to protest. I would feel a lot more excited about this apparent resurgence of anti-racist awareness if recent years had shown more evidence of a genuine activist spirit among us. Where were these tens of thousands of protesting voices when young Zahid Mubarak died at the hands of a white racist cellmate with whom he should not have been made to share a cell? When a few hundred Sikh women protested alone at discriminatory treatment by British Airways meal supplier Gate Gourmet? When British Asian Muslims are confined illegally and tortured in Guantánamo Bay with the acquiescence of the Blair government? Why did only a small minority of British Asians speak up when “Hindu” criminals in the Indian state of Gujarat, to which many are linked by familial ties, raped and killed thousands of Muslims in February 2002 in an attempt at ethnic cleansing?

Too many of us have been busy unhooking ourselves from the collective term “British Asians” and dividing ourselves into Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. The terms “Asian” and “black” were rallying points in the anti-racist organising of the 70s and 80s, whereas “British Asians” as a category has been largely absent from recent political discourse. Few displayed the outrage CBB has elicited when institutional racism in police forces was exposed. I can’t help wondering where these angry voices were when a Sikh playwright, Gurpreet Bhatti, was bullied by loud voices within her own community and even subjected to death threats. Why is racial profiling seen as a Muslim issue? Where were the custodians of Asian dignity when crews filming Monica Ali’s eponymous novel were hounded out of Brick Lane? When artist MF Hussain’s exhibition was shut down because of vandalism by goons apparently representing hurt Hindu sentiments?

A large part of the problem is that, apart from the sterling work done by a few dedicated individuals and organisations, anti-racist politics has become a facile “representation” game that involves appeasing the fragile sensitivities of a vocal few claiming to represent the whole community. It is about harassing artists and writers, demanding that they conform to “right” ways of representing the community. Meanwhile, India’s favourite cultural pastime is “representing the nation”, the very task Shilpa announced for herself as she entered the BB compound. As India anxiously finds its place within the community of big global players and tries to reconcile its economic successes with the glaring (and often deepening) inequalities that still mar its social landscape and self-image, it is increasingly obsessed with disseminating the myth of the nation as fundamentally middle-class, professional and successful. The task has partly fallen on the feminine shoulders of India’s flourishing glamour industry.

This anxiety to belong to the global community of the economically successful explains Shilpa’s repeated protests that she is not from the “slums” and did not grow up on the “roadside”. For all her disagreements with Jade, they seem to agree that economic disenfranchisement is a personal failure. Shilpa understands her task clearly: to show the world that India is really about beauty and entrepreneurial success, not slums and poverty. Losing neither time nor opportunity, India Tourism brought out a full-page ad last week in the form of an open letter to Jade inviting her to experience its “modern thriving culture”, “bustling cosmopolitan cities and quiet countryside”, and “healing spas”.

Even more disturbing is the way in which Jade and her “chav” milieu provide grist for the mill of self-congratulatory political correctness among upper-and middle-class white Britons – as though racism were an exclusively lower-class phenomenon. If anything, it is even more entrenched – because unacknowledged – in higher social echelons, even if it sounds different murmured over a glass of sherry. Gordon Brown joined the Game of National Mythologies, deploring the ways in which Jade and others did not represent that hackneyed British mantra: a “nation of tolerance and fairness”.

Just as nauseating is the play-off between ugly white slags and beautiful Indian princesses – a familiar Orientalist male fantasy. An Independent editorial described a contest between “the low-life Ms Goody” and “a pampered Indian megastar of singular beauty” (that Shilpa is hardly a megastar is beside the point). Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian deplored “ugly, thick, white Britain” and “one imperturbably dignified Indian woman [displaying] the supposed British virtues of civility, articulacy and reserve”. Shilpa does deftly combine Orientalist fantasy and Lord Macaulay’s successfully realised Anglicist project of creating “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English” in other ways.

A national debate on race relations needs to take place. But it must be more complex than the simple binaries and easy scapegoating provided by such mud-wrestling idiocies. All of us must take a good, hard look at racist practices and our own complicity in them. Let’s have done with the bullying on all sides.

Priyamvada Gopal teaches in the English faculty at Cambridge University and is the author of Literary Radicalism in India.

pg268@cam.ac.uk

Imperial Apologetics

Alex Doherty — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 23:29:25 +0000

A resurrection is haunting the British media, the bizarre apparition of “benevolent empire”. It takes the form of documentaries and discussions steered towards the conclusion that colonialism was not such a bad thing after all and that something of a celebration is in order. Trouble is, to get there, some creative reworking of the facts is needed. After a recent brouhaha about Britain’s imperial history on Radio 4’s Start the Week – in which I took part – the presenter Andrew Marr worried that the debate had been “pretty biased” against empire: there was a lot of enthusiasm and a “warm nostalgia” for empire, he suggested in the subsequent phone-in, even in former colonies, “still something there, absolutely”.

Only the desire to recover some imaginary good from the tragedy that was empire can explain the elevation of the neoconservative ideologue Niall Ferguson to chief imperial historian on the BBC and now Channel 4. His aggressive rewriting of history, driven by the messianic fantasies of the American right, is being presented as a new revelation. In fact, Ferguson’s “history” is a fairytale for our times which puts the white man and his burden back at the centre of heroic action. Colonialism – a tale of slavery, plunder, war, corruption, land-grabbing, famines, exploitation, indentured labour, impoverishment, massacres, genocide and forced resettlement – is rewritten into a benign developmental mission marred by a few unfortunate accidents and excesses.

Soundbite culture thrives on these simplistic grand narratives. Half-truths and fanciful speculation, shorn of academic protocols such as footnotes, can sound donnishly authoritative. The racism institutionalised by empire also seems to be back in fashion. The book accompanying Ferguson’s current Channel 4 series on 20th-century history, The War of the World, tells us that people “seem predisposed” to “trust members of their own race”, “those who are drawn to ‘the Other’ may … be atypical in their sexual predilections” and that “when a Chinese woman marries a European man, the chances are relatively high … that only the first child they conceive will be viable.” Not far from the pseudo-scientific nonsense that once made it possible to punish interracial relationships.

Behind such talk and the embrace of the broadcasters is the insistence that we are being offered gutsy truths that the “politically correct” establishment would love to suppress. This is the neo-conservative as spunky rebel against liberal tyranny. Yet Ferguson peddles nothing more than the most hackneyed, self-aggrandising myths of empire, canards once championed by old imperialists such as Macaulay and Mill and rehashed now by the Bush administration: western imperialism brings freedom, democracy and prosperity to primitive cultures. The myth decorates US and British foreign policy spin while trendier versions have also emerged in platforms such as the Euston Manifesto. By anointing Ferguson and his fellow imperial apologists such as Andrew Roberts as semi-official historians, the British media are colluding in a dangerous denial of the past and lending support to contemporary US imperial propaganda .

The evidence – researched by scholars such as Amartya Sen, Nicholas Dirks, Mike Davis and Mahmood Mamdani, Caroline Elkins and Walter Rodney – shows that European colonialism brought with it not good governance and freedom, but impoverishment, bloodshed, repression and misery. Joseph Conrad, no radical, described it as “a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly”. Good governance? More famines were recorded in the first century of the British Raj than in the previous 2,000 years, including 17-20 million deaths from 1896 to 1900 alone. While a million Indians a year died from avoidable famines, taxation subsidising colonial wars, and relief often deliberately denied as surplus grain was shipped to England.

Tolerance? The British empire reinforced strict ethnic/religious identities and governed through these divisions. As with the partition of India when 10 million were displaced, arbitrarily drawn boundaries between “tribes” in Africa resulted in massive displacement and bloodshed. Freedom and fair play? In Kenya, a handful of white settlers appropriated 12,000 square miles and pushed 1.25 million native Kikuyus to 2,000 restricted square miles. Resistance was brutally crushed through internment in detention camps, torture and massacres. Some 50,000 Kikuyus were massacred and 300,000 interned to put down the Mau Mau rebellion by peasants who wanted to farm their own land. A thousand peaceful protesters were killed in the Amritsar massacre of 1919.

A collective failure of the imagination now makes it difficult for us to think about the globe before European and American domination. Greed and violence are hardly exclusive to one culture. But colonialism destroyed or strangled possibilities and potential for progress, such as Mughal Emperor Akbar’s “sul-e-kul” or “universal good” which underpinned his governance. The scale of European imperialism inaugurated a new chapter in the history of greed which still shapes all our lives. Natural resources – cotton, sugar, teak, rubber, minerals – were plundered in gigantic quantities. The Indian textile industry was the most advanced in the world when the British arrived; within half a century it had been destroyed. The enslaved and indentured (at least 20 million Africans and 1.5 million Indians) were shipped across the globe to work on plantations, mines and railroads. The stupendous profits deriving from this enabled today’s developed world to prosper.

The point isn’t for Europeans to feel guilt, but a serious consideration of historical responsibility isn’t the same thing as a blame game. Forgetting history is tempting but undermines a society’s capacity for change.

Among the many facile assumptions encouraged by these imperial apologists is that those who criticise colonialism are absolving tyrants and bigots in Asia and Africa from responsibility for their crimes. Of course it is possible and absolutely necessary to condemn both. Indians must acknowledge their culpability for atrocities during the partition, for example. But that in no way exonerates the British Raj from its pivotal role in the tragedy that led to over a million deaths.

A wilful ignorance of other people’s cultures and histories encourages the notion that freedom, democracy and tolerance are intrinsically western. As Amartya Sen has argued, the subcontinent has long been home to traditions of free-thinking and debate. Participatory governance was not Britain’s gift (recall Gandhi’s indigenous village republics), even if parliamentary democracy as an institutional form was adopted in some ex-colonies. Free trade is another mythical western contribution to world history. Amitav Ghosh has reconstructed the forgotten history of a vibrant trade culture between medieval India and Africa. When the Portuguese arrived, they demanded that the Hindu ruler of Calicut expel Muslims, “enemies of the Holy-Faith”, from his kingdom. He refused and was subjected to two days of bombardment.

Indeed, one legacy of European colonialism that we all reckon with is the self-fulfilling prophecy of the “clash of civilisations”. The claim that east and west are bound to come into conflict is merely an extension of imperial practice which found it useful to seal off porous cultures into fixed categories. This tragic “lie of the colonial situation”, as Frantz Fanon called it, rebounds on us tragically in the terror unleashed in the name of Islam and Bush’s “war on terror”. If we are to undo the destructive legacies of empire, it won’t do to invest celebratory falsifications with credibility. To make sense of a shared present and look towards a more humane future, we need to start with a little informed honesty about the past.

· Priyamvada Gopal teaches postcolonial studies at Cambridge University and is the author of Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence