Anticolonialists have their myths too

Much is now being made of the evils of empire. As a child of empire I bridle. I acknowledge the wrong and injustices of colonialism, the racism, and the greed too. I accept that a re-balancing of history was due. It’s good that the darker side of the picture has now moved into the light.

But from my own boyhood experience I know that mixed among the aims of empire there were also idealism, principle, and a belief in the betterment of those we governed. And success: there were things to be proud of. The roots of my mix of pride and shame about empire are the impressions a white boy in Africa formed of the continent on which our forefathers had landed. I cannot ignore, as some anticolonial opinion does, the situation they came to.

What is now Zimbabwe (for instance) was not a stable, peaceful and kindly society. It was the front line of an immense and violent land-grab by one tribe — the warlike Matabele — from another, the peaceful, pastoral Mashona already settled there. This will have been accompanied by rape, pillage and murder as the Mashona majority were driven out. The arrival of a third party, Cecil John Rhodes, with his own version of expropriation, froze the conflict for about a century. Stability was achieved — at a cost. But the horrors that had gone before remain lodged in the unconscious folk memory of the Mashona people, and you can see in today’s persecution of the Matabele minority by an essentially Shona government the 21st-century reverberations of a vicious 19th-century territorial war.

I’m hardly qualified to drill deeper into that contested history, beyond saying this: in apportioning our guilt about the wrongs of colonialism, we do need to take account what went before. That older Africa was not a neutral, benign tabula rasa on which we scrawled our peculiar European obscenities.