Sep 12, 2022
The death of Queen Elizabeth II has focused global attention on the British royal family and renewed criticism of the monarchy both inside the U.K. and abroad, especially among peoples colonized by Britain. “There’s a degree of psychosis that you can go to another people’s land, colonize them, and then expect them to honor you at the same time,” says Kenyan American author Mukoma Wa Ngugi, who teaches literature at Cornell University and whose own family was deeply impacted by the bloody British suppression of the Mau Mau revolution. He says that with Queen Elizabeth’s death, there needs to be a “dismantling” of the Commonwealth and a real reckoning with colonial abuses. We also speak with Harvard historian Caroline Elkins, a leading scholar of British colonialism, who says that while it’s unclear how much Queen Elizabeth personally knew about concentration camps, torture and other abuses in Kenya during her early reign, the monarchy must reckon with that legacy. “Serious crimes happened on the queen’s imperial watch. In fact, her picture hung in every detention camp in Kenya as detainees were beaten in order to exact their loyalty to the British crown,” says Elkins.
See related:
- Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire: Caroline Elkins
- Imperialism and the Developing World: How Britain and the United States Shaped the Global Periphery: Atul Kohli
- Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain: Padraic X. Scanlan
- Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain: Sathnam Sanghera
- Sathnam Sanghera on Empireland – How Imperialism Shaped Modern Britain
- Empireland: The Fallout, with Sathnam Sanghera
- Is racism underpinning the ‘war on woke’? – Sathnam Sanghera
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