In his 1886 Gothic novella, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson tells the tale of Dr Henry Jekyll, wealthy, well-born, and highly respected, who develops a potion that enables him to separate his evil desires from the control of his good self, thus giving rise to the grotesque and deformed Edward Hyde. Jekyll believes that he can receive the pleasure that both parts of his being crave without each being encumbered by the demands of the other.
Watching media coverage of festivities
marking Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee – 70 years since she acceded to
the throne – I could not help feeling that the British state had achieved
something similar. The pomp and circumstance surrounding the celebrations, from
the marching troops to beacons lit around the world, were undoubtedly reminiscent
of the long-faded glories of the empire, which today are personified by the
queen and her family. However, the memory of the horrors that empire visited on
millions around the globe – where, to borrow Jekyll’s description of his
alter-ego Hyde, “evil … had left on that body an imprint of deformity and
decay” – was almost completely absent from the telling.
It was during a visit to Kenya in
February 1952 that she learned of her father’s death and became queen. She and
her husband, Prince Philip, had almost skipped that leg of their imperial tour
given that the colony was already in the early stages of the armed Kenya Land
and Freedom Army peasant rebellion that the world would come to know as the Mau
Mau uprising. The romanticised tale of the girl who went up a tree a princess
and descended a queen tends to ignore the circumstances she was thrust into as
well as the death, torture, brutalisation and dispossession of Kenyans that
would mark the first decade of her reign. Needless to say, little of that made
it into the Platinum Jubilee brochure.
A large part of the international
media seemed to obsess over the reactions of four-year-old Prince Louis to the
Royal Air Force (RAF) flypast, his facial expressions drawing “howls of delight
and amusement from the watching crowd”. In November 1953, nearly two years into
Elizabeth’s reign, my father would have been about the same age as Prince
Louis. I doubt many journalists would spend any time imagining his reactions
over the next 20 months as RAF planes flew over the concentration camps into
which the British had forced 1.5 million people and dropped nearly six million
bombs on Kenyans demanding their land and freedom. I imagine they would have
been very different.
Little ink will be spilled on another
feature of Elizabeth II’s reign – Operation Legacy, the systematic attempt to
erase and distort the truth about the colonial enterprise through the
wide-scale theft, destruction and doctoring of documents as the wind of change
swept her empire away. In 2013, after a group of elderly Kenyans sued the
United Kingdom, the Foreign Office was forced to admit it had illegally hidden
more than one million colonial-era documents that should have been
declassified. To date, these documents remain in the UK and are yet to be
repatriated to the colonies they were stolen from.
Meant to spare the British government
the embarrassment and liability for the atrocities and crimes committed during
the colonial era, the existence of the archive was hidden not just from
Kenyans, but from the British people, many of whom retain a romanticised
version of the empire as a benevolent undertaking and remain deeply ignorant of
its inhumanity.
The queen today is the Dr Jekyll to the UK’s Mr Hyde – encapsulating the glory
and benevolence of the empire with the evil separated out. Neither she nor her
descendants have deigned to acknowledge, apologise and seek to make amends for
the horrors visited upon Kenyans in her name. The $25 million grudgingly paid
out to 5,000 Mau Mau veterans in 2013 was a pittance compared to the violence
and dispossession suffered (remember 190 years ago the country used 40 percent
of its national budget to compensate slave owners – not slaves – following the
abolition of slavery), and the British government continues to deny liability
for the sins of the colonial administration, in effect arguing that Kenyans had
inherited the culpability for their own oppression. The murmurs of “regret” at
the atrocities thus fall far short of an apology. More importantly, there has
been no effort made to find and punish the people who committed the atrocities,
even though some may still be alive.
Some may argue that as a
constitutional monarch, she wields little power over the decisions made and
actions carried out in her name. However, by choosing to stay silent while she
and her family continue to enjoy the fruits of oppression, she has effectively
displayed either astounding moral cowardice or quietly endorsed those actions
and decisions.
Her Platinum Jubilee is a call to a collective misremembering of her imperial past and the violence and misery the state she heads and represents has wrought in the world. But like Jekyll, the supply of carefully crafted falsehoods keeping the Hyde-bound truth at bay is running out. Around the world, as evidenced by the protests during recent royal tours of the Caribbean and the determination expressed by those nations to rid themselves of the queen as head of state, the demand for an acknowledgement of the truth and for justice is building steam. If the UK persists in trying to hide from its dark past, it risks its international reputation and standing being consumed by it.
Source: Al Jazeera