King Charles III, Africa and the ‘sins of empire’

AS his mother was buried on Monday, Africans are asking questions about the new king in relation to the past conduct of the Crown in Africa.

Despite the tearful ceremonies, one thing kept surfacing – a missed opportunity by Queen Elizabeth II to apologise for the atrocities committed in the name of the British empire.

Africans have refused to easily forget the wrongs inextricably linked with the colonial project in Africa.

Although she has been praised in many quarters as the ‘queen of decolonisation’ given the rapid manner with which countries on the continent broke free from the colonial yoke in the 1960s to become independent nations within the Commonwealth, she had never apologised for the atrocities committed in the name of the British empire in Africa.

Firebrand South African politician Julius Malema of the Economic Freedom Fighters captured the mood of his country’s citizens perfectly when he issued a statement stating categorically that mourning the queen would be misplaced.

Malema echoed the sentiments of many South Africans and by extension other Africans across the continent when he referred to history to dust off facts about the unbridled violence which attended to the subjugation of what eventually turned out to be British colonies such as South Africa.

Hundreds of thousands of Africans died fighting against British attempts to seize their kingdoms and empires, with historical facts establishing that the conquerors were “knee-deep” in the blood of the conquered by the last decade of the 19th century.

More atrocities followed after Britain subdued countries in West Africa, such as Nigeria and Uganda and Kenya in the east of the continent, where the start of the queen’s reign witnessed a vicious war of independence by the Mau Mau in the 1950s.

Nigerian historians have regularly recalled the carnage when British troops massacred anti-colonial resistant fighters in what is now the state of Benin and the violence that resulted from the Aba riot of 1929 when women took to the streets in the town of Iloko in eastern Nigeria to demand more rights.

Pa Samba Jow, who comes from The Gambia, the last colonial possession of the British which attained statehood in 1965, says it is just natural that Africans are reacting critically about the queen, because she led an empire “that did a lot of terrible things”.

Jow, who is based in the United States, says “her death will definitely bring questions about her reign”, and that while Africans are allowed to mourn her, others should also be allowed to publicly express their feelings about her as she was not a saint.

”Yes, she may have been well dressed and elegant, but that is not enough to whitewash her kingdom’s unapologetically evil deeds against her ‘subjects’,” he says.

As King Charles III takes over, will he continue from where his mother left off without publicly expressing remorse for the excesses of the British empire in Africa, or will he tread a new path with the continent altogether?

There are already reasons for hope for the latter, given the new king’s own penchant for acting outside of tradition by voicing his opinion on otherwise sensitive issues that do not necessarily sit well with monarchical tradition.

During a visit to Ghana in 2018, King Charles III shocked the monarchical establishment when he described the ills of the transatlantic slave trade to which Britain was a principal participant as atrocious and shameful.

Watchers of the monarchy admitted that Queen Elizabeth II would never have done that.

In the run-up to the 56-member Commonwealth summit in Kigali, where King Charles III was to represent his then ailing mother earlier this year, he pulled no punches while criticising Britain’s controversial decision to literally offload asylum seekers to Rwanda, with which a deal was reached for this purpose.

By this off-script uttering, Charles had departed from a sacred tradition by British royals to remain neutral on political matters.

Perhaps reflecting how far the Commonwealth has come, the summit in Kigali opened with a statement by Charles expressing remorse for what happened during slavery and the resultant political and economic subservience of African nations which were left reeling from its impacts.

The symbolism of this position was not lost on those at the summit, where a new spirit spoke to a new world view which should begin with redefining the role of the Commonwealth.

The body now consists of not just countries of the former British empire, but also a few others in Africa, like Gabon, Togo, Rwanda, Mozambique and Namibia.

King Charles III was quoted as saying: “If we are to forge a common future that benefits all our citizens, we too must find new ways to acknowledge our past. Quite simply, this is a conversation of which the time has come”. – IOL News

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