A statue of Sir Charles Napier stands in Trafalgar Square. Napier looks out over one of London’s most famous tourist sites and is, quite benignly, described as a ‘General’. He was more than that. This man, commemorated in statue-form, was responsible for conquering Sindh in 1843, a province in what was then India and is now Pakistan. He dispossessed indigenous peoples of their land and freedom, having committed this atrocity Napier sent one word back to his superiors: “Peccavi”. The Latin for “I have sinned”. For this, he was memorialised in bronze.
Though they may be acquainted with Napier’s statue, this isn’t a tale with which many are familiar. Colonial history is not examined in all of its brutality in schools, nor is it properly remembered in Britain’s collective consciousness. Missing are the Mau Mau who were burned alive by colonialists, the Boers (themselves colonialists) and black Africans who were kept by the British in the first ever concentration camps, the thousands of Chinese people killed in the Opium Wars, the peaceful protestors who were slaughtered at Jallianwala Bagh massacre by the so-called British Raj, or the millions who died in the 1943 Bengal famine.
Instead, guided by the hands of former Education Secretary Michael Gove, British history in school is revised so that people of colour are few and far between. The scarcity of role models for children of colour translates into the present. Teaching is a white-dominated profession; in 2013 only three black people were accepted to train as history teachers. And so we are told, implicitly, only white Britons make history.
Beyond school walls denial is rife. Politicians issue half apologies for colonial crimes; afterwards it doesn’t take long for the country to shift back to remembering Empire for what it really was. When it cares to remember that this time happened at all. Bloody, murderous realities are traded for tales of swashbuckling colonialists that brought civility to former conquered countries and pride to Britain. Empire: the halcyon days of British history. Pro-Empire figures like Niall Ferguson receive undue prominence in popular culture and policy-making processes, burying the brutality of the colonial past. Though it lingers like invisible ink on the map of our present.
In this climate of omission and misremembering, it comes as little surprise that there is much more to be uncovered in Britain’s colonial history. Last night, a BBC documentary, Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners, looked under yet another unturned stone. Drawing on research from a project at UCL, we saw a glimpse of the 46,000 slave owners in this country that got rich off of the backs of people of colour. When slavery was nominally abolished in 1833, these slave owners were compensated with a mammoth pay out, equivalent to around £16-17bn, the largest in British history until the bank bailout in 2009. And yet for some time slavery only disappeared in name; many slaves were forced to work 45hour weeks for another four years as compensation to the slave owners.
But it isn’t just the weight of a history from long that falls on us. As the documentary outlined, former slave traders are remembered in country mansion plaques as “West Indian merchants” or “West Indian planters”. These people, like Napier, remain imprinted on the present without us even realising.
And again these realities are not in our schools’ history books.
Neither are some of the other facts revealed through research. Many of this country’s national figures – including George Orwell’s ancestors and former Prime Minister William Gladstone’s father, plus modern figures such as Beneedict Cumberbatch and David Cameron’s families benefitted from enslaving and subjugating people of colour. They too were compensated for their cruelty.
There’s sad irony that Napier and Gladstone have sinister colonial pasts in common. Just over a mile from where the punning General stands in central London there is a statue of William Gladstone. His hands are painted red by activists in a tribute to the female factory workers whose wages were docked to pay for the monument. If only the same principle were applied to memorials across the country. To truly give the scale of death and destruction caused by the British, whole statues, not just hands, would be covered in red.
Instead, Empire tends to be brushed aside or we are nudged to lament its loss. In this world, where colonialism is relatively benign and history is white, people of colour can never be equal.
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Maya Goodfellow is a journalist and political commentator. She primarily writes about British politics and has worked as a researcher for a think tank. She also writes about international affairs, with a particular focus on conflict studies. Find her on Twitter: @Mayagoodfellow
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