Imperialism? It’s Complex. Thankfully. - Dr Damian P O’Connor

One of the truly depressing features of the recent debates over Britain’s imperial past is the staggering ignorance on display.  In the rush to condemnation of every aspect of four hundred years of world wide experience, it isn’t just nuance that has gone out of the window, but the merest admission that there might be something complex about that history, something with shade, something with aspects of good along with the bad.  Assertions and downright falsehoods are bandied around without reference to even the most salient of facts, to the point where the famous Monty Python episode What have the Romans ever done for Us? represents a level of intellectual enquiry far in advance of most of what is on offer.  Those who want to tear down the statue of Cecil Rhodes would need only to scratch the surface to realise that the narrative of ‘white colonial capitalist exploitation of indigenous black people enriches Britain and enables the racist white Nirvana of Apartheid’ is, quite simply put, nonsense.

Let me offer up some of those complexities.  First off, the black peoples of South Africa were not one undifferentiated mass but distinct peoples – Xhosa, Tswana, Basuto, Zulu, Tembu, Venda etc – with outlooks on life as distinct from each other as the European nations, with their corresponding fair share of tyrants, conquerors, land-grabbers, statesmen, frauds and dilettantes and who, like the French, were both British allies and enemies at one time or other.  Let’s add to that the fact that the white people of South Africa were also as different as chalk and cheese; try telling an Afrikaaner that she is the same as an Englishwoman and you’ll get a lecture entitled A Century of Wrong in which the villains of the piece are very definitely not black.  Part of that story will be an inevitable reference to how we British forced them to give up their slaves in 1837 and then bilked them of their due compensation; of how those same meddling Brits prevented them from grabbing Swaziland, Botswana and Lesotho during the 19th Century and then kept them from the grip of Apartheid.  Basic understanding requires a realisation that Victorian Britain constantly worried about the value or morality of empire; acting accordingly, governments of both stripes fell on imperial issues.  Also, that individual Brits were capable of both great good and morally dubious actions; the man who deployed decisive armed force against the Zulus in 1878 also ended the Zanzibar slave trade by remarkably similar means.  Above all, inevitably, the law of unintended consequences was supreme.  When Prime Minister Gladstone ordained that Britain desist from imperial expansion in South Africa during the 1880s, the two principle results were a devastating civil war in Zululand and a huge Afrikaaner land grab.  That land grab was only stopped when Gladstone’s imperialist opponents defied him and sent the troops in to face the invaders down.

There are other, more sinister complexities to consider too, for it was the Left who raised the Red Flag in Joburg in 1922 and demanded that Workers of the World Unite and Fight for a White South Africa!  It was also the Labour Party Socialists who put the first Afrikaaner Nationalist government into office in 1924 and it was in the Stellenbosch university Psychology and Sociology Departments that Professor Hendrik Verwoerd worked out the vision of Apartheid which he operated as Prime Minister 1958-1966.  Complicated enough?  In 1856, gripped by a millennial vision, the Xhosa people killed off all their cattle and destroyed their grain pits in an act of national suicide; 40,000 people starved; British aid saved them. No white saviours?  And as for Rhodes…his statue should stay up if only because in 1875 he was arrested in Kimberley for being an anarchist revolutionary.

Whatever: in all this, there is still the bigger point to consider and that is that whatever wealth or advantage Britain gained from empire in South Africa was spent in defeating Nazism – an earlier totalitarian ideology that brooked no opposition – and that is a history to be proud of.

Dr Damian P O’Connor MA is the author of, amongst other works, A Short Guide to the History of South Africa 1652-1902.