“What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is what can you make people believe you have done?”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, 1887
There appear to be three ways — and only three — of dealing with those aspects of our personal or national histories we’d prefer to forget or to have forgotten by others.
The first is to pretend it never happened, which is what the Japanese did with their educational programme of Deliberate Forgetting after WWII.
The second is to remember it so regularly, vividly and graphically that it is woven into the warp and woof of every citizen’s personal and national consciousness for generations present and future, which is what Germany did after the Holocaust.
The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg was modelled after the German example. It is entirely redundant, not because it was funded (ironically, if only incidentally) by a gambling company, but because the legacies of apartheid are still inscribed on every face you meet on every dusty path and rural road and every street of every town and city in the country. And they’re impossible not to overhear in every nuance of every inflection of every word of every conversation, accidentally or deliberately, about any imaginable topic between every colour of any individual in any language or mix of languages in any circumstance, casual and formal. If South Africans ever forget it will be because they’re too exhausted to continue remembering.
The third and undoubtedly the most effective strategy is forensically to find, destroy, burn and bury every single scrap of incriminating evidence, preferably at the bottom of a very deep ocean, while employing the world’s most skilled and popular writers of polished English prose, prosody and poetry to rewrite every unpalatable colonial incident from beginning to end in the style, tenor and genre most likely to satisfy the tastes, appetites and sensations craved by the reading public at the given time — as adventure yarns, tales of horror, thrillers and cliff-hangers, or in heart-breaking chronicles of betrayals and tragedies, casting the victims as villains and the perpetrators as paladins — to publish the results wherever English is read or understood, in penny-dreadfuls, glossy paperbacks, intimidating tomes, or by satellite TV, preferably free-to-air, until fact becomes fiction and fiction becomes fact, which is what the British did and continue to do with the crimes of Empire and the enduring consequences of them.
The Imperial Archive provided the mise en scène for them; Wellington House would become the machine that produced them before WWI. The BBC is the 24-hour version of them.
In January 1975 when I reported for duty at Broadcast House in Commissioner Street, Johannesburg, to begin my three-year stint as a news-writer for the SABC, essentially and shamefully as a propagandist for the apartheid government of the day, I was given a five-hour briefing and handed a little blue booklet called How To Write The News. The pages that weren’t translated into Afrikaans were still branded with the old BBC logo. The playbook has never changed.
None of this is new or surprising. The great empires and dynasties have employed the same tactics since time immemorial— the Mongols, the Persians, the Chinese, the Russians, the Portuguese, the Spanish and the great Caliphates. The difference lies in three things only: the extraordinary scale of the British empire, its continuing cultural hold on so great a territorial spread of the planet, and the rise to global hegemony of the English language that coincided with the explosion of mass media in the 20th century.
But nor is it as fringe or as fanciful as it sounds. While the details of the most egregious of British atrocities may have been lost to history, the means of their disposal haven’t. Courtesy of those rare historians, academics and researchers who care about these things, much of it is now in the public domain. And more is continuing to emerge as journalists around the world struggle to keep the truth from drowning in the rising tide of disinformation from Moscow, Kyiv, Washington and London.
We should contest and expose the Kremlin’s lying. But to suggest that the public assault on truth is new, or peculiarly Russian, is also disinformation. For generations, in countries such as the UK there was no epistemic crisis – but this was not because we shared a commitment to truth. It was because we shared a commitment to outrageous lies.
As I’ve mentioned the Holodomor (the man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed as many as 5 million people) let’s take a look at another exacerbated famine: in Bengal in 1943-1944. About 3 million people died. As in Ukraine, natural and political events made people vulnerable to hunger. But here too, government policy transformed the crisis into a catastrophe. Research by the Indian economist Utsa Patnaik suggests the inflation that pushed food out of reach of the poor was deliberately engineered under a policy conceived by that hero of British liberalism, John Maynard Keynes. The colonial authorities used inflation, as Keynes remarked, to “reduce the consumption of the poor” in order to extract wealth to support the war effort. Until Patnaik’s research was published in 2018, we were unaware of the extent to which Bengal’s famine was constructed. Britain’s cover-up was more effective than Stalin’s.
The famines engineered by the viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, in the 1870s are even less well-known, though, according to Mike Davis’s book Late Victorian Holocausts, they killed between 12 and 29 million people. Only when Caroline Elkins’s book, Britain’s Gulag, was published in 2005 did we discover that the UK had run a system of concentration camps and “enclosed villages” in Kenya in the 1950s into which almost the entire Kikuyu population was driven. Many thousands were tortured and murdered or died of hunger and disease. Almost all the documents recording these great crimes were systematically burned or dumped at sea in weighted crates by the British government, and replaced with fake files. The record of British colonial atrocities in Malaya, Yemen, Aden, Cyprus and the Chagos Islands was similarly purged.
Just as the Kremlin requires a campaign of disinformation to justify its imperial aggression in Ukraine, the British empire also needed a system of comprehensive lies. Not only were our imperial crimes deleted from the record, but an entire ideology – racism – was constructed to justify the killing, looting and enslavement of other people.
George Monbiot
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/30/putin-lie-machine-history-untruths
The deeper you dig, the dirtier it gets.
During proceedings in the British High Court in 2010, University of Warwick historian David M Anderson submitted a statement referring to 1,500 files that went missing from Kenya as British rule in the region was coming to an end.
This led the British government to concede that they had hidden or disposed of those files, and many others at a high-security facility north of London. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office was hiding around 600,000 historical documents in breach of the 1958 UK Public Records Act.
The stash included around 20,000 undisclosed files from 37 former British colonies. Indeed, it’s common knowledge that as the British colonial edifice was disintegrating, administrators of the colonies were told to either burn their documents or try and smuggle them out.
https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/crimes-against-humanity-the-british-empire/
I’ve quoted these at some length only to make the point that it’s all out there if you choose to look for it. Most of us won’t; some of us shouldn’t. Why take on the guilt of centuries when yesterday’s betrayals alone could keep us in anguish for a lifetime?
Cleansing history of its national, racial, and cultural biases will take some doing if the historiography of the British abolitionist movement is anything to go by. The received wisdom, including the version we were taught in South Africa, is that the campaign of evangelical animal-lover William Wilberforce (1759 – 1833) to prick the British national conscience awake to the outrage of human trafficking was so passionate and so compelling that even the most stone-hearted politicians of the day wilted in the blaze of his moral indignation. Thanks to him alone, and by extension to Britain alone, slavery was outlawed forever, everywhere on the planet.
So enduring was the Wilberforce narrative of Christian righteousness with regard to the vassalage of African natives that even Verwoerd’s apartheid government of South Africa in the 1960s, the Ground Zero of racist divisionism, was sensitive to the inference of it.
“Separate Development”, Verwoerd would argue, was the very opposite of slavery. Far from being bonded vassals of the whites, the Bantu tribes could exercise their liberty and their right to self-determination in their very own homelands, a policy more generous in spirit and application than was afforded to persecuted minorities in most countries of the world at that time.
The policy was less cynical in theory than it was in practice. For Afrikaner Calvinists the moral question had long ago been settled by conflating Genesis 9’s “Sons of Ham” with their exegesis of Joshua 9:21 in which God, observing how the Israelites were tricked into sparing the lives of some of the indigenous inhabitants of the Promised Land, declares (via the mouths of princes):
Let them live; but let them be hewers of wood and drawers of water unto all the congregation.
In practice it meant the same thing, but with all of apartheid’s attendant horrors.
Most white South Africans bought this version, just as most Britons bought the Wilberforce version. Among the legatees of British colonialism who didn’t was one Eric Williams, an apostate in the woodpile whose 1938 book Capitalism and Slavery argued the British abolition of their Atlantic slave trade in 1807 had more do to with economic necessity than with Christian altruism or liberal humanitarianism. His point was very simple: British workers in the factories and forges and on the farms of industrial England had to be paid for their labour — the slaves in the colonies didn’t. This gave colonial producers of globally traded goods an unfair advantage, and the only way to level the economic playing field was to free the slaves.
This was shocking in the 1930s when globalism meant only that the world was round. But it is precisely the same argument that motivated the coal miners of West Virginia to vote for Trump’s protectionist agenda, and that still inspires the animus against Romanian fruit-pickers in Britain today.
The British dealt with Eric Williams the way they deal with all political dissidents: they made him a Companion of Honour, and quietly set about discrediting his theory.
The handing out of gongs is and has always been the cheapest and most effective way of co-opting high-profile critics of the English establishment to piss out of the tent they were pissing into. Especially if they’re actual outsiders, i.e., black.
The Williams version is as plausible as the Wilberforce version, and I have no way of knowing which one comes closer to the truth. The illustrative difference is only that the Williams version has been written out of history and the Wilberforce version hasn’t.
But I did come across a few interesting facts while I was researching this. The Qin Dynasty (221–206 BC) outlawed slavery in China. The Xin Dynasty outlawed it again in 9 AD.
William the Conqueror prohibited the sale of slaves to non-Christians in 1080, presumably because he thought Christians would be nicer to them.
Iceland abolished slavery in 1117. In the 13th century the Holy Roman Empire condemned slavery as “a violation of man’s likeness to God”. Norway abolished slavery in 1274. Louis X abolished slavery in France in 1315. Sweden, Poland and the Ming Dynasty abolished slavery in the 14th century. In 1493 Queen Isabella of Castile banned the enslavement of Native Americans unless they were “hostile or cannibalistic”. Native Americans were ruled to be subjects of the Crown, and Columbus was prohibited from selling Indian captives in Seville. Those already sold were tracked, purchased from their buyers, and released. In 1503 Native Americans were allowed to travel to Spain only of their own free will. In 1537 Pope Paul III promulgated the Sublimis Deus which forbade slavery of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and sanctioned their right to freedom and property. The Sublimis Deus also applied to any other population yet to be discovered.
By 1800 slavery had been outlawed in Japan, Portugal, Haiti, Chile, Serbia, Russia, Spain, Scotland, Habsburg, Denmark and Malta.
In 1805 a bill for the abolition of slavery was passed in the House of Commons but rejected in the House of Lords.
Only a hopelessly naïve romantic would imagine that history could be returned to its pristine state of innocence by cleansing it of its accumulated cultural and political blemishes and stains. Enter the Winston Wolfe of historiography: H.G. Wells.
I see a lot of blank looks when I mention H.G. Wells in English company. This puzzled me when I first began to talk about him with some enthusiasm to anyone who would listen. I thought they’d be happy to know how much I admired the genius of one of their national treasures. I imagined he’d be right up there with Terry Pratchett, OBE, Sir Bruce Forsyth, Sir Mo Farah and Jimmy Savile. Oh.
It took me a while to figure out that the man who in the decades between the two world wars was regarded in Britain, the United States and the Anglophone diaspora as the world’s most influential living writer had quietly been removed from English literary and political discourse and placed in a glass box alongside Eric Williams and a Bushman in a little-visited museum. That Wells should have been so effectively written out of history when he was the first author since Tacitus to attempt to write an unbiased history of the world is doubly, absurdly, and tragically ironic.
Profoundly shocked by the horrors of the First World War, Wells described history as “a race between education and catastrophe”. In 1919 he set aside his fiction to write The Outline of History, intending, as his subtitle said, to provide …a Plain History of Life and Mankind.
It sold two million copies in short order and was still in print in 2005. But, with the notable exception of the eminent historian Arnold J. Toynbee, it was met by the academic establishment with “unmistakeable hostility”.
“They seemed not to realize,” Toynbee wrote, “that, in re-living the entire life of Mankind as a single imaginative experience, Mr. Wells was achieving something which they themselves would hardly have dared to attempt.”
In a lecture at the Royal Institution of Great Britain on Friday, 20th November 1936, Wells would take his idea of a universal, unbiased framework of historical knowledge even further. Dismayed by the social and political ignorance of the framers of the Treaty of Versailles, fearing another world war, and deeply frustrated by the inability of world leaders to see beyond their national interests, he proposes the creation of an updateable repository of knowledge for “the ordinary man”:
The World Encyclopaedia would be a row of volumes in his own home or in some neighbouring house or in a convenient public library or in any school or college, and in this row of volumes he would, without any great toil or difficulty, find in clear understandable language, and kept up to date, the ruling concepts of our social order, the outlines and main particulars in all fields of knowledge, an exact and reasonably detailed picture of our universe, a general history of the world, and if by any chance he wanted to pursue a question into its ultimate detail, a trustworthy and complete system of reference to primary sources of knowledge. In fields where wide varieties of method and opinion existed, he would find, not casual summaries of opinions, but very carefully chosen and correlated statements and arguments.
It would, he said, be “…the mental background of every intelligent man in the world. It would be alive and growing and changing continually under revision, extension and replacement from the original thinkers in the world everywhere. Every university and research institution should be feeding it. Every fresh mind should be brought into contact with its standing editorial organisation. And on the other hand its contents would be the standard source of material for the instructional side of school and college work, for the verification of facts and the testing of statements — everywhere in the world. Even journalists would deign to use it; even newspaper proprietors might be made to respect it.” (My italics)
I discovered on Wikipedia that I wasn’t alone in thinking that it sounded a lot like, yes, Wikipedia. Joseph Reagle writes:
“… H. G. Wells was concerned that his World Brain be an ‘encyclopaedia appealing to all mankind’, and therefore it must remain open to corrective criticism, be sceptical of myths (no matter how ‘venerated’) and guard against ‘narrowing propaganda’. This strikes me as similar to the pluralism inherent in the Wikipedia ‘Neutral Point of View’ goal of ‘representing significant views fairly, proportionately, and without bias.’”
Wikipedia isn’t always right. It is vulnerable to abuse. It is inherently elitist when only 34% of the world’s population have access to a computer and 14% are still illiterate. For some time to come its content will continue to reflect the profile of its contributors — the academically privileged, the promotionally savvy, the intellectually self-sufficient, and the digitally capable.
It clearly doesn’t appeal “to all mankind”. As of 1st September 2017, there were 5,468,991 Wikipedia articles in English, and it continues to grow at a rate of over 20,000 articles a month. But that constitutes only the tiniest fraction of one percent of the approximately 4.59 billion pages that were on the internet on Monday, 28th June, 2022. If the internet is Wells’s “World Brain”, Wikipedia is just a pinprick of neurons in one of its temporal lobes.
And nor does it yet represent “significant views fairly, proportionately, and without bias.” It is disproportionately Western, and disproportionately white.
The Wikipedia page titled “Abolitionism in the United Kingdom” fails to mention Eric Williams.
But it tries to be neutral. It has been able to resist the commercial bias that would inevitably result from an attempt to monetise it through advertising. Even more importantly it is a living, growing thing, less of a fixed repository of historical knowledge than an emerging consciousness. For this reason alone Wikipedia, or some future version of it, offers us hope that education will win the race of history before catastrophe does.
In the 20th century, history’s winners were able to write the history of history’s losers out of history. Today we are beginning to read their stories and hear their voices. Tomorrow someone may include Eric Williams in the public history of abolitionism. It would be a small moral victory in vast libraries of British colonial revisionism, but the pulp fiction of the 20th century would be nudged a fraction closer towards the non-fiction shelves in your local bookstore.
One day we may be as publicly conscious of slavery’s legacies and our colonial genocides as we are of apartheid and the Holocaust. But I suspect it will be the same day the British establishment embraces H.G. Wells as the author of something more important than The Invisible Man.
Acceptance comes with understanding. Understanding begins with remembering.