Maria Misra
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,761626,00.html
So the Belgians are to return to the Heart of Darkness
in an attempt
finally to exorcise their imperial demons. Stung by another
book
cataloguing the violence and misery inflicted by King
Leopold's
empire on the Congo in the late 19th and early 20th century,
the
state-funded Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels
has
commissioned a group of historians to pass authoritative
judgment on
accusations of genocide: forced labour, systematic rape,
torture and
murder of the Congolese, around 10 million of whom are
thought to
have died as a consequence.
This is not the first time that the Belgian empire has
been singled
out for censure. Back in the Edwardian era, British humanitarians
spilled much ink over its excesses, and Conrad's novella
was
corralled into service to show Leopold's Congo as a sort
of horrific
"other" to Britain's more uplifting colonialism.
Complacency about Britain's imperial record lingers on.
In the
post-September 11 orgy of self-congratulation about the
West's
superiority, Blair's former foreign policy guru, Robert
Cooper, and a
host of journalistic flag-wavers were urging Britain
not to be
ashamed of empire. Cooper insisted empire was "as necessary
now as it
had been in the 19th century". The British empire was,
we were
assured, a generally well-intentioned attempt to inculcate
notions of
good government, civilised behaviour and market rationality
into less
well-favoured societies.
Is such a rosy view of British imperialism justified?
Many argue that
it is. After all, surely the British have less blood
on their hands
than the French and the Belgians. Wasn't the British
addiction to the
free market a prophylactic against the horrors of forced
labour? And
didn't their peculiar class obsessions make them less
racist than the
rest? And isn't India not only a democracy, but, thanks
to the
British, one with great railways? Perhaps there is a
kernel of truth
in some of this, but there's also much wilful smugness.
While the
complex consequences of colonial economic policy require
extended
analysis, it is possible to dispel more swiftly the myth
that the
British Empire, unlike King Leopold's, was innocent of
atrocities.
While everybody is aware of the horrors of nazism, popular
historians
have been surprisingly uninterested in the dark side
of the British
Empire.
There are exceptions, such as Mike Davis's powerful Late
Victorian Holocausts,
but much else still lies buried in the academic literature.
Davis and others have
estimated that there were between 12 and 33 million avoidable
deaths
by famine in India between 1876 and 1908, produced by
a deadly
combination of official callousness and free-market ideology.
But
these were far from being a purely Victorian phenomenon.
As late as
1943 around 4 million died in the Bengal famine, largely
because of
official policy.
No one has even attempted to quantify the casualties caused
by
state-backed forced labour on British-owned mines and
plantations in
India, Africa and Malaya. But we do know that tens of
thousands of
often conscripted Africans, Indians and Malays were either
killed or
maimed constructing Britain's imperial railways. Also
unquantified
are the numbers of civilian deaths caused by British
aerial bombing
and gassing of villages in Sudan, Iraq and Palestine
in the 1920 and
1930s.
Nor was the supposedly peaceful decolonisation of the
British Empire
without its gory cruelties. The hurried partition of
the Indian
subcontinent brought about a million deaths in the ensuing
uncontrolled panic and violence. The brutal suppression
of the Mau
Mau and the detention of thousands of Kenyan peasants
in
concentration camps are still dimly remembered, as are
the Aden
killings of the 1960s. But the massacre of communist
insurgents by
the Scots Guard in Malaya in the 1950s, the decapitation
of so-called
bandits by the Royal Marine Commandos in Perak and the
secret bombing
of Malayan villages during the Emergency remain uninvestigated.
One might argue that these were simply the unfortunate
consequences
of the arrival of economic and political modernity. But
does change
have to come so brutally? There are plenty of examples
of wanton
British cruelty to chill the blood even of a hardened
Belgian. Who,
after all, invented the concentration camp but the British?
The
scandalous conditions in British camps during
the Boer war, where
thousands of women and children died of disease and malnutrition,
are
relatively well known. Who now remembers the Indian
famine-relief-cum-work camps, where gentlemanly British
officials
conducted experiments to determine how few calories an
Indian coolie
could be fed and still perform hard labour? The rations
in these
camps amounted to less than those at Buchenwald.
There is Churchill's assiduous promotion of schemes to
cut the costs
of imperial defence in India and the Middle East by using
aerial
bombing, machine gunning and gassing for the control
of rebellion,
political protest, labour disputes and non-payment of
taxes. There is
the denial of free food to starving south Asians on the
grounds that
it would simply hasten a population explosion among India's
"feckless
poor". There is the extraordinary British justification
for bombing
Sudanese villages after the first world war: Nuer women
were,
officials claimed, of less value to their community than
cattle or
rifles.
Does it matter that the British are smug about
their imperial past,
that British atrocities have been airbrushed from history?
One can't
help thinking that Jack Straw's pious missions to India
to broker
solutions to the Kashmir crisis might have more credibility
if the
British had the good grace to apologise for such imperial
crimes as
the Amritsar massacre. But a more worrying symptom of
this rosy
glossing of the imperial past is the re-emergence of
a sort of
sanitised advocacy of imperialism as a viable option
in contemporary
international relations.
The point of cataloguing Britain's imperial crimes is
not to trash
our forebears, but to remind our rulers that even the
best-run
empires are cruel and violent, not just the Belgian Congo.
Overwhelming power, combined with a sense of boundless
superiority,
will produce atrocities - even among the well-intentioned.
Let's not
forget that Leopold's central African empire was originally
called
the International Association for Philanthropy in the
Congo.
Maria Misra is lecturer in modern history at Keble
College, Oxford