Magazine / History / Narrating the Nation / Article | 06/05/2008

Colonialism in the European memory, by Andreas Eckert

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Colonial past and national identity

Admittedly it is not only in France that the repercussions of the colonial experience have become an important theme, not only for scholarship but also for public opinion and occasionally for politics itself. Next to France, the clearest manifestation of interest in the consequences for the present of the colonial past is probably in Great Britain. The Empire struck back in numerous forms in the United Kingdom, not least in the form of strengthened migration from the (former) colonies after the Second World War.[1] In the Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie, himself a "child of the empire”, found a vivid expression for what he sees as the immense importance of the empire for British history, when he wrote that the problem of the English was that their history had essentially taken place overseas and that, as a result, they could not understand its importance.[2] But British colonial history did not take place only overseas, but also in Great Britain itself and it left behind its traces there as well.

It is an old question whether and in what way possessions and activities overseas have an effect back on the "mother country”. In his extremely popular study, The Expansion of England, published in 1883, Sir John Seeley, Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, was able to imagine that the creation of the British Empire had occurred "in a fit of absence of mind”. He certainly did not want to suggest by this that the imperial conquerors and proconsuls did not know what they were doing. Seeley was more saddened by the fact that the majority of Britons showed not the slightest interest in, and little knowledge of, the imperial undertakings of their country. In his book, he noted with consternation, "We continue to assume that we are only a race inhabiting an island off the North coast of the European continent.”

According to Seeley, Great Britain was on the contrary an imperial nation sui generis, for which expansionism constituted part of its self-understanding and self-definition. For a long period, however, this view was unable to prevail. There is a certain irony in the fact that the academic interest in the empire and in the repercussions of the imperial experiences onto the "mother country” intensified only after the British Empire was already a thing of the past. Until barely two decades ago, those who worked on British imperialism were dismissed as reactionary collectors of military memorabilia dreaming of past greatness. Today, however, there are numerous studies on the academic market which in different ways try to lend credence to the thesis that the empire did form a fundamental component of British culture and national identity.[3] Linda Colley has even ventured to claim that British identity only arose by means of a conscious differentiation from "the colonised other”.[4]

In the meantime, it has become popular to link almost every aspect of British society with imperialism (and its after-effects). But people thereby go too far, as they overcompensate for decades of neglect of this dimension. The enthusiasm with which every play and every consumer habit is given an imperial agenda has been greeted with a fair amount of scepticism by, for example, the historian Bernard Porter. Great Britain may well have had a world empire on which the sun never set; but the British, he writes, were in the vast majority ignorant or indifferent about it. Above all, at no point was there ever a single unitary "imperial culture” which prevailed over or decisively influenced the nation. Porter agues that the British Empire was far too large a multifaceted and fissured construction for that. But Great Britain itself is also a very complex society, characterised by religious, political, regional and class distinctions. Under these circumstances, the idea that there was a monolithic national culture steeped in the empire does not make sense.[5]

There were therefore good reasons for doubting whether the British Empire itself, even at the height of its power, was in fact as significant for the life of the majority of Britons as is often claimed. But if the influence of the empire in the past was basically limited, how can it be, then, that memories of it are of great relevance to the present and the future of British society? Since the end of the Second World War, the majority of the British have in any case shown themselves incapable of dealing with the profound change in national identity caused by the end of the empire. The guilt connected with the imperial project, and sadness at the loss of the empire, continue to be extensively suppressed. Instead of a reappraisal, there is more a flight into exaggerated narcissism, and into the artificial paradise of a homogenous identity.

This flight finds its expression, for instance, in xenophobia and in a denial of the really existing multiculturalism in the large cities. The question of the immigration of "children of the empire” to Great Britain became a political issue of the first order in the 1960s, and it has not disappeared from public debate since. While a large past of the press was at first opposed to limitations on immigration, the reaction of the population to the increasing immigration of "coloured” Commonwealth citizens was unambiguously negative. Politics soon swung onto an anti-immigrant course. The opponents of continued immigration from the Commonwealth not only feared for the national identity of Britain, they also considered immigrants to be brazen abusers of the welfare state. In parts of the population, racial ideologies have been on the march since 11th September 2001, and they manifest themselves in different ways: in hysterical debates about asylum seekers, in hostility towards immigrants from Eastern Europe, in fear of "black” criminals and above all in anxiety about infiltration by foreign, especially Muslim terrorists. Against this, in the larger cities, multiculturalism among youths of all colours is practised at all levels of popular culture.[6]

Against this background, the memory of the slave trade, colonial rule and decolonisation is currently contradictory in Great Britain. Above all, the commemoration of slavery is omnipresent.[7] The formal occasion for this was the 200th anniversary of the decision by the House of Commons to proclaim the slave trade with British and other colonies to be illegal. A year ago, the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, once again expressed his sadness and "deep regret” at the fate of the estimated four million African slaves who were carried off on British ships to the so-called New World to work as forced labourers on the plantations there. Under the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury, this sad chapter in human history was commemorated in London with a "walk of witness”. In Liverpool, which was then the most important English port for the slave trade, and which is at the centre of celebrations for the 200th anniversary of abolition, an International Slavery Museum was opened in 2007 which, in the words of its web page, wants to "provide opportunities for greater awareness and understanding of the legacy of slavery today.”

Large exhibition projects are getting underway in many other British cities too. In the Museum in Docklands in London, a long-term exhibition on "London, Sugar and Slavery” has been opened. Hull in the North of England has celebrated the memory of the city's most famous son, William Wilberforce, the evangelical and gifted speaker who led the campaign in the British parliament for abolition. In the meantime, several critics have complained that such "memory hype” has less to do with slavery, and more to do with somehow feeling good and celebrating supposed British values like democracy and tolerance during the war on terror. The struggle against the slave trade and slavery was already made into an emblem of national virtue two hundred years ago, a means by which the British were able to assert their moral superiority over other peoples. Even the end of colonial rule in Africa and Asia was for a long time proclaimed to be an expression of a liberal disposition, and presented as a success story which stemmed from the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon love of liberty.[8]

This image suffered serious damage, not least as a result of the debates about the behaviour of the British Army in the Mau-Mau war in Kenya in the 1950s. A BBC documentary, and the books published simultaneously at the beginning of 2004 by David Anderson and Caroline Elkins, disposed comprehensively of the widespread view that British colonial rule in Africa had ended peacefully.[9] These books awoke in Great Britain unpleasant memories of a dark chapter of the country's colonial history in Great Britain which had long been suppressed. At the time, the British had presented their struggle against the Mau-Mau to suppress an anti-colonial revolt in Kenya as a war between barbarism and civilisation, as a rebellion by Africans who could not cope with modernity and who wanted instead to flee into a primitive tribal past, in order to prevent the wheel of progress from moving forward. The most important writer among the white colonists in Kenya, Elspeth Huxley, called the Mau-Mau "the yell from the swamp”.

The British colonial administration reacted with massive force against the rebellion, which was above all led by the Kikuyu people. Ninety-five Europeans were killed, including thirty-two civilians, as against 20,000 Africans killed. During the war, which lasted for a good seven years, more than one thousand Africans were hanged on the basis of hastily passed anti-terror laws, a far higher figure than in any other colonial conflict including Algeria. Some 70,000 Africans ended up in prisons or internment camps without trial, where the administration subjected them to a rigorous programme of re-education. Over 100,000 people were re-settled. Colonial Kenya in the 1950s was, David Anderson wrote, a brutal police state: "In their attempt to maintain influence and authority, the British government, which a decade earlier in the Second World War had fought resolutely against tyranny, itself became tyrannical.”

Anderson's and Elkins' books unleashed an intense public debate in Britain. "Our Guantanamo” was the Guardian's headline over an article about the Mau-Mau, and The Economist similarly drew parallels between the British attitude in Kenya and American foreign policy under George W. Bush. Important common aspects were said to include a lack of any sense of responsibility, a rough judicial system, contempt for international conventions, mistreatment of prisoners and arrest without due process. In The Independent, the historian Stephen Howe deplored the failure of British intellectuals to speak out at the time. In comparison to the engagement of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and others against the crimes committed during the Algerian war in France, the reaction of British thinkers and artists to the excesses of violence in Kenya was said to be shamefully inadequate. At public discussion meetings about the colonial war in Kenya, there were calls for surviving colonial officials to be brought to justice. Other called for reparations.

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