Cloud of colonialism hangs over Queen Elizabeth’s legacy in Africa
By Nkiru Thabetu-Nyame
5 April 2018
The recent visit by former UK prime minister David Cameron to the African continent served as a litmus test for the position of the British state in Africa. But what was the role of Whitehall in the recent history of the continent?
Today, it is fashionable to discuss the “decolonisation” of Africa. The phrase is a euphemism deployed by self-appointed experts and activists to undermine an African problem that, after centuries of European imperialism, is no longer the problem of its white rulers but is, rather, an open and self-evolving “historical crisis.”
Historical decolonisation, in other words, is a process of disestablishing and disorienting the imperialists in their colonial and neocolonial capitals.
The current wave of “decolonisation” is the product of the same colonial-nationalist elites which, a century ago, organised the Second World War as a “final solution” to the German and Japanese empires.
The historical decolonisation of the British Empire in Africa was carried out by the colonial and imperialists under Queen Elizabeth I. The “decolonisation” of Britain in South Africa and Canada was carried out by the colonial and imperial interests.
The decolonisation of Great Britain in Africa was carried out by colonial and imperialist forces, led by the British state, which, on the eve of the Second World War, was responsible, according to one of the last historians of this aspect of the British Empire, Hugh Trevor-Roper, for 150,000 deaths, “more than three times the number killed by the Indian Army alone.”
The British state sought to disorientate and disestablish the colonial and imperialists in their colonial and neocolonial capitals.
As a result, the British government in Whitehall sought to remove the very foundations upon which all colonial and imperialist organisations must be based and to ensure that Africans were no longer seen as “peoples” with values, interests, and aspirations that are incompatible with European ones.
There is no mention of the role of white colonial or imperialists in