In a recent historic reunion at Senate House, London University, academics, ambassadors and politicians from across the Commonwealth discussed what the British Empire had meant to their respective countries – the good and the bad. Henry Frendo took part in the event.
The ball was set rolling by Kwasi Kwarteng, author of The Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World (2011). British by birth but the son of Ghanaian immigrants, a graduate of Cambridge and Harvard, Kwarteng has been a Tory MP since 2010.
On the positive side, there scored the improvements in infrastructure, communications, schooling, the civil service and judiciary. On the negative side, there was domination, oppression, arbitrariness, discrimination, divisiveness, and indeed exploitation – most manifestly, slavery
He saw the empire neither so positively as in Naill Ferguson’s neo-con perspective of practically a civilising force for modernity (How Britain made the Modern World, 2009), nor in ‘black tag’ terms as just a means for exploitation, as in much of Samir Amin’s Marxist, anti-capitalist, ‘underdevelopment’ writings.
The opening message in this refreshingly open ‘coming to terms’ with the Imperial experience, mainly from the point of view of one-time subject peoples, was that there was no overall set piece for colonial policy or approaches; individuals mattered very much and, to quote the New York Times Book Review, “the Empire granted far too much authority to the wrong people”.
On the positive side, if ambiguously, there scored the improvements in infrastructure, communications, formal schooling, the civil service and judiciary traditions, and generally, as it turned out, English, however imposed. On the negative side, there was domination, oppression, arbitrariness, discrimination, divisiveness, and indeed exploitation – most manifestly of all, until the 19th century, slavery.
Several were the distinguished speakers and participants. Prof. Joseph Ayee, of the University of Ghana, a former vice-chancellor in Accra, asked what balance sheet there was to live with; whereas Surendra Nihal Singh took a nostalgic but critical look at ‘British India’. A well-known author, Singh is the legendary, fearless editor of India’s The Statesman, which he ran until the 1980s.
Dr Martin Aliker, Uganda’s former Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, focused on the work undertaken in his country by Sir Andrew Cohen, its federalist-minded governor from 1952 to 1957, credited with innovative contributions in the political, economic and developmental fields. (Cohen was in Malta in 1942 to help organise food supplies.)
Simon Zukas, a white African sometimes hailed as a ‘freedom fighter’, had been deported from Northern Rhodesia in 1952 but then served as an MP in Zambia for 15 years, five of them as a minister. As he noted, several Rhodesians went to farm in Zambia after Robert Mugabe’s ultra-nationalistic clampdowns scared them off.
Session three, The View from the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, was addressed by the Guyana-born Sir Ronald Sanders, a graduate of the University of Sussex and currently a visiting Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, a one-time diplomat, ambassador and leading Commonwealth personality. As a Caribbean expert on the political economies of small states he saw the region individually and collectively, not ignoring slavery, trade and ongoing development concerns.
Entitled Legacies of Empire in the ‘Fortress Colony’ of Malta: Language, Jobs and Governance, my own talk highlighted what I called a ‘theory of the template that is, a Westminster constitutional model to aspire to and work towards, in spite of all the dysfunctions and contradictions this represented on the ground, in a colonial context, the more so in an island ‘obsessed’ by strategy, security and, partly for such reasons, with internecine strife, where however, a European legacy preceded the Imperial one.
Malta developed a pluralist body politic and a thriving economy; it remained one of the few ex-colonies that had no ethnic conflict or a coup d’etat, becoming instead a member of the EU and of the eurozone.
As I had mentioned the deportees to Uganda in 1942 at the same time of the George Cross award, one participant, Tommy Gee, a friend of the late Maltese diplomat Philo Pullicino, reminded me of the contribution of James Martin of Malta in the evolution of Zanzibar and Uganda who, together with Andrea Debono, ranks as a 19th-century pioneer explorer and factotum in the heart of the ‘Black Continent’.
But my surprise was reserved for the conference dinner when a gentleman who sat next to me at table, Phillip Bliss Aliker, a widely-travelled London-based barrister and chartered arbitrator, asked me if I was Maltese, whereupon he proudly announced that the first girl he had ever kissed was Maltese.
“What was her name?” I enquired.
“Karen Grech,” was his reply.
They were at school together in Kampala. As Edwin Grech’s parents were next-door neighbours in Zebra Street, Birżebbuġa, I recalled their excitement every time their doctor son would be visiting on holiday from southern Africa. I had not known that the Grechs had also spent time in Uganda (not as deportees) but then, when I went to Rhodesia-Zimbabwe from Geneva after the Lancaster House agreement in 1980, I was just as surprised to receive a telephone call inviting me to lunch at the University in Harare – from the Maltese-Rhodesian Association.
The world, partly thanks to the Empire, was not small enough. Lord Carrington was there, getting on in years but still lucid and alert. We chatted about the Rhodesia-Zimbabwe project but also about Malta, as I had interviewed him on camera at his residence in 2006 for my ill-fated PBS-TVM series L-Istorja Minn Wara l-Kwinti.
He had had quite a taste of Dom Mintoff in the early 1970s, and he now inquired about his passing away. Carrington served as a Tory MP and minister between 1951 and 1982, as Foreign Secretary from 1979 to 1982, and was Nato’s secretary general from 1984 to 1988. This distinguished veteran’s appearance on the rostrum to discuss (with Lord Hennessy and Lord Boateng) The View from the UK, led to a warm round of applause.
The fifth and final session saw that redoubtable and charming lady civil servant-turned-politician from Hong Kong, Anson Chan, chart a possible path forward for Hong Kong’s democracy in spite of Chinese wing-clipping, even to suggest perhaps a Taiwanese influence in the same direction.
The final word belonged to Harshan Kumarasingham from Wellington, New Zealand, who is on his way to a scholarship in Cambridge. He came up to me and has since been in touch again as he is writing a book about Commonwealth governor-generals. He wants to consult the papers belonging to Sir Maurice Dorman and to Sir Anthony Mamo, Malta’s two governor-generals between 1964 and 1974.
The Legacy of Empire conference, organised jointly by the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and the Overseas Service Pensioners’ Association, also served as an occasion, at their request, for the launch of my two latest books, both of which dwell on the experiences, implications and consequences of Imperial-colonial times. The books were on show in the Grand Lobby of the Chancellor’s Hall, with, for background, the famous painting of the Queen Mother in her gown at the University of London when she was its Chancellor between 1955 and 1981.