Author: Jonathan Steele
Publication: The Guardian
Date: January 20, 2006
URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1690778,00.html
The chancellor wants to reclaim the flag from
the right. Far more important is to face up to the reality of its barbaric
history
On holiday in Sri Lanka, a Sinhalese friend
lent me a book about Britain's conquest of the island just under two centuries
ago. Neither of us knew that Gordon Brown was soon to deliver a speech on
Britishness, so my reference point at that stage was George Bush's Iraq.
The similarities between April 2003 and British
policy in Sri Lanka in 1815 were uncanny. Determined to remove the King of
Kandy, who controlled the mountains of the island's interior and was the last
bastion of independence, the British conspired with local nobles to topple
the autocratic ruler.
But, instead of withdrawing as the nobles
had been led to believe, the British stayed on in Kandy. "You have now
deposed the king, and nothing more is required - you may leave us," one
of them said in polite desperation.
I was reminded of the graffiti that appeared
on the pedestal of Saddam Hussein's statue less than a month after US marines
pulled it down in central Baghdad: "All done. Now go home."
The Americans haven't, and nor did the British.
The result was a guerrilla insurgency that the British put down with enormous
savagery. PE Pieris's book Sinhale and the Patriots 1815-1818 is a work of
immense scholarship that includes testimony from the then British governor
Sir Robert Brownrigg's official papers as well as the reminiscences of army
officers.
If we are to celebrate Britishness as the
chancellor wants us to do then the lesser-known aspects of our past ought
to be thrown into the mix. If one of the elements of Britishness today is
fairness then let us remember that the year 1815 saw not only the triumph
of Waterloo but also a vicious campaign of colonial brutality much further
afield.
As the Sinhalese insurgency grew, Brownrigg
advised London not to tolerate "the disgrace of a great military nation
being expelled by a band of semi-barbarians without discipline and but little
courage". He recommended that "the people must be driven to peace
by starvation and burning". Captain Ajax Anderson promised, "We'll
track the savage to his den with famine, sword, and flame," and Colour
Sergeant Calladine whiled away his tedious time on sentry duty by composing
chauvinistic verses:
But British courage still prevailing,
soon we made our foes to fly
and, their villages assailing,
caused some hundreds for to die.
See their villages a-burning,
and their temples soon laid low,
this the wretches get for joining
with the jungle rebel foe.
The Sri Lankan atrocities were among the earliest
in a long line of imperial barbarity. Their perpetrators were at least honest
- which makes them marginally less repulsive than those empire builders who
claimed "our" standards were higher than the other side's.
I remember once squeezing into a Kabul bookshop
that was little more than a cupboard in the wall with barely enough room for
its elderly owner and one customer. From the packed shelves he offered me
the memoirs of a 19th-century British officer. It had a chapter called The
Cruelty of the Afghan.
Claiming "the Afghan imbibes a taste
for violence with his mother's milk", the officer described being sent
to rescue a small group of troops ambushed by Afghan fighters on a mountain
road. As he drew near, he saw the men were dead. The only Afghan in sight
was a boy of about seven struggling to behead one of the corpses with a knife.
This was meant to be a story about Afghan cruelty, and the officer apparently
saw no irony in recounting (I foolishly did not buy the book so my memory
of the exact wording may be faulty): "The busy little urchin did not
apprehend my approach. I took him on the point of my bayonet and tossed him
over the cliff."
It would be nice to think that this kind of
barbarity was confined to the phase of imperial acquisition, or that what
was politically correct in the 19th-century became unacceptable later. Alas
no. The placid years of settlement in Africa and Asia were shot through with
racist arrogance and contempt for local cultures, apartheid in practice if
not in name. Those Britons abroad who made an effort to learn languages and
study religions, and came to admire the traditions and practices of the people
they ruled, were always a tiny minority. And when the natives got restless,
brutality quickly resurfaced. Two books that came out last year on Britain's
suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s uncovered brutality
and mass murder, ordered by the British authorities, on a scale that matched
Kandy in 1815.
A year or so ago Gordon Brown said it was
time Britain stopped apologising for the empire. If only Britain had started
to. Instead we have seen a flood of new books and articles glorifying it,
while school texts still take the most benign approach to our imperial record.
The chancellor wants to reclaim the union
flag from the right, then oddly cites the American model of the stars and
stripes in the front garden. Does he not realise that most American homes
that fly it are rightwing ones? He would have done better to cite Sweden,
an impeccably centre-left country, where a triangular pennant of blue and
yellow flies outside many a suburban social-democratic house.
But flag-flying, whether right or left, is
not the main thing. At this stage of history the British public style is too
undemonstrative, and cautious about every kind of emotional display, for most
people to wear flags anywhere except on their underwear. Brown's call will
not be followed.
The real issue is to reclaim British history
from the right. Tolerance of others is a value that today's Britain boasts,
but it is not the dominant feature of recent centuries. Nor is Britain's new
acceptance of multiculturalism the result of a willing or easy choice. It
was necessitated by the arrival of tens of thousands of former colonial subjects
and the demands of their British-born children for respect and equal rights.
Fairness has been forced upon us.
That same fairness demands that we assess
and teach our history accurately. The growing number of Britons who are not
descended from an empire-building or empire-running past know from their own
families' oral reminiscences, and from the white-supremacist chauvinism they
encounter, that the textbook story of Britain's past is a lie. Recognising
our true history is what the chancellor's Britishness campaign should focus
on.
j.steele@guardian.co.uk
