The spectre of the “woke academic” has haunted public discourse, on and off, for years. It grew out of an older, broader disdain for humanities staff in particular: purveyors, it was said, of a pointless and politically-motivated education, in exchange for which students racked up enormous debts. Prominent, now, on the charge sheet is the claim that we confuse, in our writing and teaching, the encouragement of critical thinking with the preaching of a particular line on vexed questions of identity politics and social justice. Worse still, we do it using the linguistic equivalent of what my old headmaster used to call a “notice-me haircut”: a stream of fussy, high-sounding abstractions, infused with a sense of moral superiority.

The new SOAS guidance offers up plenty of red meat for those committed to this view. The prose is a little portentous in places, and the usual linguistic suspects are all present and correct: heteronormative, whiteness, coloniality. There is also the old trick, pioneered by Sigmund Freud, of pre-emptively defending your ideas by making opposition to them a symptom of psychological deficiency — in this case we find “institutional gatekeepers” potentially locked in a “subconscious struggle” to avoid sharing their power.

And yet the clever thing about Freud’s trick was that sometimes he was right: one really might oppose an idea on apparently intellectual grounds without recognising the emotional charge involved. Beneath my frustration with some of the toolkit’s prose (“coloniality’s operational life” — was there really no other way of putting that?) lies a certain amount of wounded pride at what can feel like undergraduates schooling me on how to teach.

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If I had a criticism of efforts to decolonise university curricula, it would be that they rarely give enough space to defining “colonial”. The historical insight at the heart of efforts to decolonise this or that aspect of contemporary Western life is that modern European colonialism was about much more than boots on the ground. Cultural seeds were sown via colonial and missionary education systems, the ways that colonial bureaucracies categorised people, the respect in which Western intellectual output came to be held and the felt need among some colonised people to acquire certain skills or adopt certain ideologies in order to get ahead — or even survive — under colonialism.

Leaving aside for a moment the question of which of the Western ideas involved were good or bad, the point is that they put down deep and stubborn roots, becoming a kind of cultural knotweed. Colonisers were affected too, as people in countries such as Britain and France were fed warped understandings of the non-Western world and were encouraged to take it for granted that their own ideas and standards — moral, political, civic — enjoyed universal applicability.

A good historical and moral case can be made for decolonising our knowledge in this sense: recognising and tackling entrenched habits of thought, sometimes in painful and humiliating ways where difficult topics including racism and religion are in play. If that case is not made, or is made badly, then public sympathy beyond our universities may be in short supply — especially if the word “colonial” is misconstrued in some quarters in terms of anti-white racism, anti-capitalism or Western self-hatred.

What does all this mean for philosophy? What it clearly doesn’t mean is getting rid of Socrates, Aristotle and Plato on account of them being pale, male and stale. It is more about treating them as part of a particular tradition that has gained outsized influence because of the economic and military power of Europe and the wider West in recent centuries. What we need is a more comparative approach to philosophy, putting different traditions and individuals from around the world in conversation with one another. As one of the creators of the toolkit, Paul Giladi, tells me: “Good ideas are not restricted to any particular geolocation.”

This is harder than it might sound. It is surprisingly difficult to avoid using familiar categories when approaching new ideas or cultures. Students of religion find themselves tempted to use the Abrahamic faiths as a yardstick in exploring other traditions: looking for a personal God, a holy book, a set of beliefs. Mental health professionals trained in the diagnosis and treatment of conditions such as anxiety and depression likewise find that applying these terms too hastily in unfamiliar contexts means they miss something about the nature and meaning of the distress they encounter.

For Western students of non-Western philosophies, similar challenges lie in store. Across much of the Western tradition, being is the supreme principle of reality and self-consciousness the starting point of all our knowledge. In parts of Japanese philosophy, by contrast, nothingness is the supreme principle and self-consciousness a can of worms. Nishida Kitarō features in efforts at SOAS to decolonise philosophy, and he’s a good choice. Besides being a founding figure in modern Japanese philosophy, he serves as a warning against tokenism in decolonising our curricula. His Kyoto School of philosophy in fact owed much to German philosophy, and vice versa, encouraging us to think cross-culturally about how ideas are generated. The Kyoto School has also been subject to a great deal of opprobrium in Japan throughout the years, for what critics claim are its links to Japan’s own colonial project in the first half of the 20th century.

It’s good to see Confucius make the cut, too, at SOAS and elsewhere. Even that name tells a story. The man himself was “Kongzi”, christened “Confucius” by Jesuit missionaries who were among the first Europeans to explore Chinese thought back in the 1600s and 1700s. They did so, inevitably, through their own lens: making comparisons with ancient Greece and Rome, praising the idea of ethical action as a good in itself — as opposed to a means towards heavenly ends — and enlisting Confucius in their attempts to portray China to their compatriots back home as a sophisticated society that was ready for the gospel.

Takeshi Morisato, a philosopher at the University of Edinburgh, tells me that most universities cannot yet support the small classes required to really make the “open dialogue” approach required for decolonising the curriculum work well. Nor, he says, do most universities have enough staff who speak the languages and possess the life experiences out of which non-Western philosophies emerge. “Nothing,” he says, “beats having a few friends from diverse backgrounds who can be patient about each other’s intellectual blind spots.”

Decolonisation efforts in universities are big on “lived experience” and critics enjoy giving them a pounding for it: pure narcissism, or an abyss of “my truth, your truth” relativism. And yet surely the lives and experiences out of which philosophical ideas emerge are part of their richness. Arthur Schopenhauer’s rather grim view of human life somehow makes more sense once you know that he suspected the worst whenever the postman called and slept at night with loaded pistols by his bed.

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If we instead treat philosophical ideas in the abstract, we lend them an aura of universalism and authority that they don’t necessarily merit. All we learned at school about the life of Immanuel Kant was that he ate cheese sandwiches because he was too busy thinking to cook. And perhaps even that wasn’t true. Paying attention, instead, to the roles of identity and lived experience, including those of students, in generating philosophical ideas and arguments needn’t mean giving up on evaluating those ideas and arguments.

Involving students in the creation of such curricula is surely a good thing, but here as elsewhere there’s a balance to be struck. At one point, the SOAS toolkit talks about “enabling [students] to identify what they need to learn”. In my experience, some students enjoy this challenge of co-creating a syllabus. Others wonder what they are paying upwards of £9,000 a year for if they’re required to do so. As Bill Murray puts it, eating shabu-shabu with Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation: “What kind of restaurant makes you cook your own food?”

One of the challenges for the decolonisation agenda is to avoid conflating a healthy inquiry into the conditions of our knowledge — historical, political, racial — with the pushing of a particular political agenda. Another, says Morisato, is to avoid simply making a pretence of decolonising the curriculum — “complying with liberal language on campus” — as opposed to embracing the radical nature of the project.

I think he has a point. Much of the culture-war hand-wringing over decolonisation stems from a sense that the other side is speaking or acting in bad faith. But if us woke academics can invest some energy in generating a quality of trust with our students that overflows beyond the classroom, then our ivory towers may be good for something after all.

Schools closed and the summer exams were cancelled, but I kept my new job. It was a comprehensive school, and my brief was to tutor kids who were academically struggling through Google Meet, the fat and ugly cousin of Zoom. Because everything was up in the air, I was given free rein to teach the kids whatever I wanted that could reasonably be considered English Literature. So I decided to teach them about the poets I have enjoyed since I was little, such as Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney. Those few months constituted one of the best periods of my life.

The OCR, one of the main exam boards in England, will remove the poetry of Heaney and Larkin (among other poets) from its school syllabus this September. Their justification is simple: the syllabus needs to be more inclusive and exciting. Heaney and Larkin are male and stale. They reflect a bygone era that doesn’t speak to an increasingly diverse classroom. They will be replaced by poets from British-Somali, British-Guyanese and Ukrainian backgrounds, and one of the first black women in 19th century America to publish a novel. 14 out of the 15 new writers added to the syllabus will be non-white. Jill Duffy, the chief executive of the OCR, stated: “This is an inspiring set of poems that demonstrates our ongoing commitment to greater diversity.”

This change is part of a wider movement to decolonise the curriculum. For too long, supporters of this movement argue, schools have deliberately excluded people of colour from the English canon and History textbooks. Just as ethnic minority people are discriminated against across society, they are marginalised in the classroom, and the latter injustice reinforces the former. One way to challenge this state of affairs is to decentre white, male authors, replacing them with writers who fall into other categories.

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The narcissism of America's race politics

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Jeffrey Boakye, the author of the recent book, I Heard What You Said, is a prominent advocate for decolonising the curriculum. Boakye, a black British man of Ghanaian heritage, argues that teachers should engage more vocally with race politics. For him, “being a non-white teacher is an inherently political position”. And the reason why the curriculum is “so unapologetically white is the arrogance of empire”. Our values, he argues, are rooted not in “scientific, political and industrial revolutions” but “in genocide, slavery and colonialism”.

Boakye is an English teacher. And English, according to the movement to decolonise the curriculum, should advance social justice. In his book, Boakye refers to one of his students, a black girl called Gertrude; he writes that after he taught her a poem called “Checking Out Me History”, by the British-Guyanese poet John Agard, she felt seen. “It spoke to her experience of a white education that didn’t speak to her sense of personal history.” The poem mentions figures from history like Toussaint L’Ouverture and Mary Seacole: we are supposed to believe it is great precisely because it celebrates black heroes.

The viewpoint of the curriculum decolonisers is based on the assumption that black students resonate most with poetry written by black poets. That is nonsense. Why should a black African student, for instance, identify at all with a poem written by a West Indian man? Because of their shared race? Race is not the only thing that defines the life and experiences of a person; I used to think only avowed racists believed it does. At a more practical level, why should a poem be taught if it can speak to students only on the basis of their being black: what about the Asian and white and mixed-race students in the classroom? This is not inclusion; it is division.

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Decolonising the curriculum takes place at a superficial level, whereas I taught Larkin to my students because his poems move me at a visceral level: they convey the sense that, yes, this is what it is like to be haunted by fear and loneliness and impotence. And they do so with artistic virtuosity, using the right words in the right order to express such feelings. Consider these contrasting descriptions of death in his late masterpiece “Aubade”, both of them spot on but stylistically different from each other: the straightforward description is the “anaesthetic from which none come round”, and the more elegant version is:

The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is not a male or stale sentiment; this is a poem full of versatility and exactness, range and compactness. In other words, it is characterised by stylistic diversity, which should be a more relevant form of diversity in an English Literature classroom than the vagaries of skin pigmentation.

The poetry critic Jeremy Noel-Tod argues in a piece for the New Statesman that someone like Larkin should be replaced by the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. He writes that, “as a white teenager growing up in rural Norfolk in the Nineties, I wish my teachers had taken the chance to talk about the Soyinka poem in class”, because the Nigerian poet “might have helped us to understand structural racism as the scaffolding of the home country we took for granted”. If Noel-Tod wants to argue Soyinka is as good a poet as Larkin, fair enough, but his argument doesn’t reference art or merit. He is treating poetry as a sub-set of sociology — arguing that we should read non-white poets because they offer us insights into social and political issues.

If English is simply another variant of sociology or politics, why should the study of it be distinguished from these subjects? Sheffield Hallam University has recently been criticised for suspending its English Literature degree and incorporating it into a degree that consists of Literature, Creative Writing and Language. The justification for this proposal is that the study of English should serve a purpose, that it should have tangible benefits, such as enabling students to get a professional job. Many of the people who advocate for decolonising the curriculum might object to this, not recognising that they are also arguing that English should have a purpose — not getting students a job, but making them less racist. Even if they don’t officially want English to be assimilated into other fields of the humanities, like politics, in practice that is what they promote.

This is profoundly patronising to a writer such as Soyinka. He is the first African to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But a white poetry critic like Noel-Tod doesn’t value him for his artistry, but for his activism.

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Another problem with filtering literature through this rigidly ideological lens is that it disables the fundamental quality of any devoted lover of literature: curiosity. It stops us from reflecting on the particular cultural context of a poet or his poetry, and instead takes a reductive view of writers. Consider the case of Seamus Heaney: why should a poet who grew up in rural Northern Ireland, in a Catholic family, be seen as embodying the white, male British establishment? Ultimately, though, what matters to those who love Heaney and Larkin is not their identities; it is their expert manipulation of language.

I love the firmness of Heaney’s lyricism and his scrupulous eye. In “Blackberry-Picking”, for instance, he writes of both the joy (“You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet / Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it / Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for / Picking”) and the darker side to this endeavour (“But when the bath was filled we found a fur, / A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache. / The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush / The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour”). This is what ultimately distinguishes poetry, not communicating a direct message, but evoking a powerful sensibility.

Of course, a poet’s ability to do this does not depend on their race. The fact that great poets from non-white backgrounds are excluded from study is bad. But it is bad not because the identities of such poets are not being “centred”; it is bad because students are missing out on great poetry. Blindness to the artistic work of ethnic minority people is worthy of criticism, but assessing such writers on a tokenistic or ideological basis is another form of blindness: in both cases, the poetic merits of their work are ignored.

Those who support decolonising the curriculum see the relationship between non-white and white authors only in terms of conflict. They see it as a zero-sum game: we need to decentre white and male writers to empower writers from marginalised communities. But this underestimates the debt that many non-white authors owe to the traditions of Western literature. Writers are always in conversation with each other. Toni Morrison is renewing William Faulkner; Zadie Smith is renewing Dickens; Derek Walcott is renewing Homer. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was written in part as a rejection of Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but the title of Achebe’s novel is taken from a poem by William Butler Yeats and the plot resembles the structure of a Greek tragedy. There is some conflict between white and non-white authors in the canon, but there is also great continuity between these two groups. By ignoring this fact, Boakye is reinforcing an assumption anti-racists ought to dismantle: that to be Western is to be white.

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Black radicals don't need white saviours

By Tomiwa Owolade

W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most influential radical black thinkers of the 20th century. But he also loved Richard Wagner. Du Bois proudly affixed himself to Western culture. As he put it, “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the colour line, I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas. From out of the caves of evening that swing between strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”

C.L.R. James, the Trinidadian Trotskyist, similarly affirmed an attachment to Western civilisation: “I didn’t learn literature from the mango tree,” he once wrote, “or bathing on the shore and getting the sun of colonial countries; I set out to master the literature, philosophy and ideas of Western civilisation. That is where I have come from and I would not pretend to be anything else.” In his dying days, when he was visited by Edward Said, James wanted to talk to Said about classical music rather than colonialism. When he died, James was called the Black Plato by the Times.

The traditions of Western literature and culture belong just as much to black people as white people. It is part of my inheritance. And that is why I loved teaching those kids: I was sharing what belonged just as much to them as to the kids with hundreds of books in their family homes or a private education.

My favourite student was a boy called Peter. I could tell from his surname that his family came from Ghana. He came to every single lesson, while all my other students found an excuse to skip at least a few classes. I never met Peter. I still don’t even know what he looks like; his camera was always turned off. But we cultivated a connection, not through the fact that both of our families come from west Africa, but by familiarising ourselves with the great works of English Literature. We read Larkin and Heaney, but we also read Derek Walcott. We read snippets of prose too — George Orwell and Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. The priority in studying James and Morrison was the elegance of their sentences, the effect of their imagery, and the sophistication of their tone. When we did approach the topic of racism, we had a foundation to build on. And all the time, I never felt the need to “decentre” white, male authors or slap on diverse voices for the sake of it. I was simply guided by what has moved me since I was a boy and continues to move me now: the transcendent beauty of great art.

Writing in 1852, Dickens was satirising the dramatic failure of the 1841 Niger Expedition, the brainchild of the Quaker abolitionist Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton. Like other liberal abolitionists of the era, Buxton believed that the only way to stamp out the slave trade in West Africa was to penetrate the continent’s unexplored interior to establish model villages and trading settlements, where, under the influence of free trade and Protestant Christianity, African kingdoms whose economies had depended on slavery for centuries would be civilised into liberal modernity.

Yet like the fictional Borrioboola-Gha scheme, “which turned out a failure in consequence of the King of Borrioboola wanting to sell everybody — who survived the climate — for Rum”, the expedition, which departed with high hopes, popular acclaim and the fundraising efforts of British dignitaries from Prince Albert to Lord Palmerston, was an abject failure, with the “staggering cost of £79,143… borne by taxpayers”, the historian Richard Huzzey notes, “largely because the Whig prime minister, Viscount Melbourne, wanted to associate his faltering ministry with a popular anti-slavery project”. A quarter of the participants died of fever shortly after setting out, yet, “commissioned in the final gasp of public anxiety over slave-holding in Britain’s own West Indian colonies and as a desperate attempt to revive the current ministers’ anti-slavery credentials,” the precedent it set established the pattern for Britain’s later conquest of most of the African continent, an irony of history that does not seem to have entered the public consciousness today.

There is a timely lesson for us about mission creep and the unintended consequences of moral crusades in distant lands that the Victorian campaign against slavery highlights. For all that the topics of slavery, colonialism and imperialism have been discussed endlessly in the culture wars of the past few years — usually by conflating the three very different processes — the archetypal British colonialist in the crucial mid-19^th century period was not the sneering pith-helmeted figure of legend, but rather idealistic liberal and evangelical abolitionists, often Quakers, middle-class liberal women and free trade advocates, who genuinely saw British imperial might as a means to right the moral wrongs of distant societies of which they knew little.

As the recent outpouring of commentary demanding that the United States prolong its 20-year military intervention in Afghanistan for the continuance of liberal humanitarian ends reminds us, the Mrs Jellybys, endlessly demanding that something should be done, are still very much with us. In the conquest of much of Africa, liberal humanitarianism and imperialism strode hand in hand into the forested interior: an accurate understanding of how this happened is more timely than ever.

The process of Britain’s growing political entanglement with the African continent took place in three very different stages. In the first, a product of the early modern period, British traders enmeshing themselves in the new, globalising capitalist economy discovered that rich profits could be made buying slaves from African coastal rulers and transporting them to the New World as forced agricultural labourers, paying for them with the products of the new factories. It would be more accurate, then, to characterise the Atlantic slave trade as a product of capitalism or even of globalisation than of either colonialism or imperialism, yet our newly-woke global corporations seem curiously loath to make this connection.

It was the second phase, the idealistic and humanitarian imperialism of the abolitionists, that set the stage over the course of the mid-19^th century for the acquisitive, high imperialism of the Scramble for Africa. This story, for both Britain and Africa, curiously enough begins with the American Revolution, when British forces offered liberty to any enslaved African-Americans who were able to escape their rebellious masters. When Britain lost the war, the freed slaves were evacuated north to Nova Scotia as refugees, where the question of what to do with them troubled British policymakers. The abolitionist lobby, led by Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce and prominent members of the evangelical Clapham Sect, devised the plan of transferring freed African-Americans and Jamaican Maroons to the British outpost of Sierra Leone, where they would form the nucleus of a civilising mission to convert the natives away from their slave-trading ways, and towards the light of capitalist free trade and Christianity.

By 1791, the Sierra Leone Company, run by liberal humanitarians including Wilberforce, had taken over governance of the nascent colony, initiating a process described by the historian Bronwen Everill as one where  abolitionists had adopted a worldview “defined by this loose coalition of ideas: the ‘civilization’ of Africa via an end to the slave trade, adoption of standards of western life, material culture, and institutions; Africa’s conversion to Christianity; and the introduction of ‘legitimate’ commerce to simultaneously replace the slave trade, enrich the colonies and the metropoles, and inspire ‘civilized’ consumption.”

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As with the humanitarian interventions of our own era, ideals of free trade, globalised capitalism, military intervention and the conversion of downtrodden natives to liberal Western ways were intertwined from the start. For Sierra Leone’s governor, Charles MacCarthy, the division of the colony’s unexplored forests into parishes run by the Church Missionary Society was the beginning of a process that would make “Sierra Leone the base from whence future exertions may be extended, step by step to the very interior of Africa”. As Everill notes, “colonisation was a developing anti-slavery ideology,” which “disrupted local economies, power structures, ideologies, and religions in much the same way that settlers in Australia or North America overcame the aboriginal peoples.”

Yet the failure of the Niger expedition radically altered the process by which the British conquest of West Africa took place. Instead of leading through example, the British Foreign Office and Admiralty found themselves drawn into an ever-widening series of military interventions to eradicate slavery at its source, which would lead inexorably, though unintentionally, to direct colonial rule. Firstly, the anti-slavery campaign of the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron turned out to be almost wholly ineffective: the trade in enslaved Africans boomed over the course of its deployment as American and Spanish merchantmen, backed by their governments, refused the Royal Navy’s authority to board their slaving vessels.

Instead, the Royal Navy settled on a policy of eradicating the slave trade on the ground, sailing into coastal towns and villages to pressure their kings and chieftains to sign agreements banning the sale of slaves, and bombarding them and replacing their rulers when they did not. Bit by bit, driven by the unintentional logic of humanitarian intervention, Britain found itself the master of much of the West African coastline.

Similarly, in the forested interior, Sierra Leone’s “Afro-Victorian” middle-class descended from freed American slaves pushed the boundaries of their settlement into unexplored regions, dragging London’s writ behind them. As historians such as Philip D. Morgan have noted, the freed African-Americans who became Sierra Leone’s elite had acquired a frontier mentality of rugged individualism and capitalist enterprise from their American sojourn, and applied the same logic to Africa’s interior. For all the misgivings of politicians and civil servants in London, the boundaries of the Sierra Leone colony expanded as its black elites — who had, in Morgan’s phrasing, “rediscovered in Africa their true American selves” — pursued their manifest destiny into the forests, bringing them into conflict with as yet-unconquered peoples, and dragging the British state into military intervention on their behalf.

Over the course of the 19th century, the modest humanitarian goals of the Sierra Leone colony for freed slaves had evolved into the conquest of much of Nigeria, from the naval bombardment of Lagos in 1851, followed by its annexation in 1861, to the conquest of the mighty slaving kingdom of Benin in 1891 (whose spectacular looted bronze sculptures, the fruit of the Atlantic slave trade, remain in contested British custody today), and then the defeat of the country’s Muslim, slave-trading north towards the end of the century. Driving these conquests was the desire not just to bring Christianity but also the creed of anti-slavery.

Many Africans were bewildered by the shift in British policy, and the destruction of their traditional ways of life. As late as 1897, the Nigerian historian Philip A. Igbafe observed, the deposed Oba or ruler of the Benin kingdom pleaded from his jail cell for permission “to catch some Urhobo slaves for sacrifice as the rains were falling too incessantly for the good of the people and their crops,” a request the new British rulers denied. In what is today Ghana, the Asante king or Asentehene asked of the British “‘But if they think it is bad now, why did they think it was good before?’” and continued the trade in humans that had for so many centuries underpinned the kingdom’s existence, little thinking that it would lead to its downfall.

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Yet the unwillingness of African rulers to go along with the newfound abolitionist crusade of the British middle classes had set the stage for a reinterpretation of Britain’s mission from one of education and negotiation to one of military conquest and direct enforcement of liberal mores. As Huzzey notes, “blunt bigotry and frustration at African slave-dealing led the Spectator, in 1853, to moan that ‘British lives are lavished on the African coasts to negotiate and treat with the Black babies who can’t keep from selling each other and cheating us.’ The paper concluded that it was impossible to educate West Africans as ‘moral observers of the Anti-Slavery faith.’” Instead, the perceived intransigence of African rulers “moved Britain to kindle freedom with force”, setting the stage for the expansionist, racialised imperialism of the later 19^thcentury.

After a series of bloody Anglo-Ashanti wars, the historian Marika Sherwood notes, “The Asantehene was forced to sign a treaty, giving up any claims to the coastal forts and territories, and to his vassal states. The British thought this would be the end of Asante empire-building, but on his accession King Prempeh I slowly began to resuscitate his country and mobilise his troops. The British asked him to accept ‘Protectorate’ status. The King refused. The British invaded the kingdom, burnt down the capital city of Kumasi and looted it of all its treasures.” From Ghana to Nigeria, from its modest utopian Quaker roots in Sierra Leone, the logic of humanitarian intervention had led, step by unintended step, to the destruction and looting of native kingdoms and their replacement by direct British rule.

Yet by this point, whatever appeal direct humanitarian intervention on the African continent had held for Britain’s governing classes had long since evaporated. As the Colonial Secretary, the Duke of Newcastle, observed in 1861, “the ‘suppression of the Slave Trade’ is leading us into serious Territorial complications, on the whole W. Coast of Africa.” Prefiguring anti-interventionist voices today, the Times in 1863 demanded with exasperation,

“Who ever heard of a war in Gambia? What do we know of the King of Bedaboo, and why should we rejoice at having taught him a “severe lesson!” What harm has he done us and why should we be anxious to pay an additional income tax for the pleasure of killing . . . his sable subjects? As it stands it looks as much like a piratical inroad as any exploit we ever read about. . . . who ordered it? And who will pay for it? . . . Can it be possible after all the lessons we have received of the inflammatory character of little wars we can find ourselves in the thick of a ‘war upon Gambia’ without notice, and so far as we know, without reason?”

By 1865, the parliamentary select committee chaired by Charles Adderley was strongly advising against any further extension of direct control and urged British withdrawal from Africa, though only once the slave trade had been finally extinguished, an exit strategy whose conclusion seemed to stretch further and further out of reach. The financial benefits accruing to Britain were, contrary to modern perceptions, negligible: throughout the early and mid-19^th century, trade with the entire African continent made up less than 2.6% of Britain’s trade balance.

As even James Stephen, described by the historian Seymour Drescher as “the Colonial office’s most influential abolitionist undersecretary” warned, “[If] we could acquire the dominion of the whole of that continent, it would be but a worthless possession.” As the Times complained in 1873, “why do we retain or even extend what we call a Protectorate over this pestiferous coast?” And yet, as Huzzey notes, “Anti-slavery policies locked an unwilling state into obligations toward African colonies.” And then as now, it was the moral crusading of journalists that drove Britain into its next wave of imperial expansion.

The British military conquest of West Africa had led to the extinction of the international trade in enslaved Africans — British governors, wary of enraging local populations, still turned a blind eye to the institution of domestic slavery — yet the pacification of the coast pushed the focus of the slave trade deeper into the interior. “Arab” slave traders from the Sultanate of Zanzibar — often in fact Islamised Swahili-speakers — penetrated deeper and deeper into the unexplored regions of Central Africa in pursuit of forced labour for the clove plantations of Zanzibar and the date groves of Basra and Arabia, focussing the attention of British liberal abolitionists on the continent’s east. Into this situation strode the crusading figure of David Livingstone, whose mission into the continent’s unexplored interior, and lurid and harrowing depictions of Arab slave raids, awoke a new wave of popular abolitionist fervour.

Just as the British government was losing its taste for humanitarian intervention in Africa, letters from the long-lost Livingstone republished by his “discoverer”, the Welsh journalist Henry Morton Stanley, demanded to a captivated audience that the successes of the West African campaigns be reproduced “on the opposite side of the continent”, so that “no reasonable expense, that preserves us from contamination, should be esteemed a sacrifice” in extirpating “the open sore in the world”.

Driven by popular pressure that something should be done, “the Liberal government under Gladstone — a longstanding skeptic of anti-slavery violence — reluctantly sanctioned a mission to Zanzibar”, Huzzey observes. “In August, his ministry declared war on the East African slave trade in Queen Victoria’s speech opening a new session of Parliament. The cabinet approved negotiations for concessions that would allow the Royal Navy to suppress the slave trade effectually,” setting the scene for the conquest of East and Central Africa by first Britain and then the other European powers.

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By Mary Harrington

The modern fixation on Rhodes’s more nakedly imperialist power grabs conceals the awkward truth that from Livingstone to Baker, Gordon to Lugard, Britain’s exploration and conquest of Africa took place under the banner of humanitarian intervention against slavery. From Zanzibar into Uganda, the Sudan and the depths of Central Africa, British abolitionist activism and rhetoric dragged British generals and administrators into wars against local rulers more or less against the government’s express orders, driven by popular fervour and the moralising exertions of what the British assistant secretary at Zanzibar termed “the period of cheap journalism”, wherein, as Huzzey notes, “complex political and economic struggles with African leaders could be easily reduced in reports home to stories of British officers fighting villains addicted to slave trading”; meanwhile the cruelties of the “Arab invasion,” and the conquest of nations could be chivalrically framed by its practitioners as “those of a gentleman defending a woman or child from an abusive ‘ruffian.’”

By the time of the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, called by Bismarck, and now seen as the beginning of the Scramble for Africa and the highpoint of European imperialism in the continent, the popular clamour by liberal and evangelical activists for anti-slavery conquests had established the principle that military intervention against African states and their replacement with European governance was not just legally permissible, but an overriding moral duty.

Where before anti-slavery activism had driven colonial expansion, now the veneer of anti-slavery action was cynically applied to win popular support for nakedly imperialist power grabs. When even as sinister an actor as King Leopold of Belgium framed his conquest of the Congo as a mission to extirpate slavery from the Dark Continent’s darkest reaches, he was lauded as a hero by the liberal press and abolitionist activists in Britain. As late as the early 20^th century, British anti-slavery activists were applauding the Italian conquest of Libya and Ethiopia, both ostensibly carried out to rid the countries of the stain of slavery. As Drescher notes, “antislavery became a major rationalisation for the legitimising and creation of European spheres of dominion” in Africa, whose effects have defined the continent’s subsequent history. As one anti-imperialist MP, Sir Wilfred Lawson, observed in opposing Lugard’s conquest of Uganda, “formerly we stole Africans from Africa, and now we stole Africa from Africans.”

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It is noteworthy that the recent historiographical reassessment of British and European colonial expansion in Africa in this crucial, mid-19^th century period is a direct product of historians observing the exact same processes at work during the past 30 years of American military hegemony and humanitarian intervention. As Hegel famously declared, the owl of Minerva flies at dusk, and perhaps it is only now that this strange period is itself passing into history that we can reassess the humanitarian impulses of our forebears, who were driven by similar noble aims into ever-widening and counterproductive moral crusades. As historians have noted, liberal women activists like the fictional Mrs Jellyby were central figures in establishing the current of moral indignation at home that pressured the British government into reluctant colonial expansion, in India as well as Africa, a parallel that can be clearly seen today in the reshaping of America’s Afghan war as a feminist cause.

It is worth remembering then, when we are lectured via Instagram stories or the lobbying of activist groups about the evils of slavery, colonialism and imperialism for which we must all now make penance, that much of the interplay of these three quite separate historical processes was carried out at the moralising behest of their direct forebears.

Unlike the moral clarity of propaganda, history is a series of ironies and ambiguities; in this case, the irony that, entirely contrary to the dominant popular narrative, the fervent moral certainties of today’s activists reflect precisely the same dynamics which led the British state, initially reluctantly, into the conquest of much of Africa for what seemed noble, humanitarian ends.

Like the poor, the Mrs Jellybys will always be with us: perhaps, now the second historical wave of humanitarian crusading is drawing to a close, we can limit the future unintended consequences of their activism, for our sakes as well as those of the unwitting objects of our imperial mercy.

Two recent reports, however, have strongly challenged the first two axioms, and thereby dislodged the third. March saw the publication of the Sewell report on race and ethnic disparities, which presented hard social scientific data calling into doubt the assumption that unequal outcomes for non-white racial groups are always, or even usually, attributable to racism. It also bluntly contradicted the claim that contemporary Britain is structurally racist. Predictably, its conclusions were greeted with howls of protest, with several commentators simply unable to digest the idea that a racial inequality might not have racism as its cause.

The second report, which appeared last month, verbally endorsed the axiom that British colonialism was essentially racist, while substantively undermining it. This was composed by the Special Committee to Review Historical Inequalities in Commemoration, which had been set up by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. It revealed that up to 54,000 Indians and Africans who died in the service of the British Empire during the First World War had been commemorated “unequally”, and at least a further 116,000 had not been commemorated either by name or at all.

The report itself attributed the unequal treatment ultimately to “imperial ideology”, that is, “the entrenched prejudices, preconceptions and pervasive racism of contemporary imperial attitudes”. The fateful phrase “pervasive racism” was then picked up and broadcast by the press from the Guardian to the Times, and by television stations such as the BBC and Al Jazeera. Asked to comment, historian David Olusoga provocatively summarised what the report had discovered as “apartheid in death”. Casual onlookers could readily be forgiven for walking away confirmed in their conviction that British colonialism was essentially racist, and that the sooner the British “decolonise” themselves, the better.

Yet closer inspection reveals a very different story. The report makes clear that the Imperial War Graves Commission (as it was known then) was committed to the principle of the equal treatment of all the Empire’s fallen troops in the commemoration of their sacrifice, whatever the colour of their skin. Writing in 1926, the Commission’s founder, Fabian Ware, was unequivocal in stating that “all the soldiers of the Empire should be treated alike”. The report also makes clear that this principle was consistently realised in Europe, something which can easily be confirmed by a visit to the Menin Gate, where the names of Indians with no known grave join those of fallen British comrades cascading down the walls; or to the cemetery at Noyelles-sur-Mer, where the burials of members of the Chinese Labour Corps are marked by individual headstones, just like those of British soldiers elsewhere.

Outside Europe, however, this egalitarian policy was sometimes compromised. Many Indian and African casualties were commemorated, not with individually marked graves, but collectively with their names inscribed on memorials or, if missing, in memorial registers. Other, mainly East African and Egyptian personnel, received no commemoration by name and perhaps none at all. This deviation from the norm in Europe, the Commission’s report tells us, was due to “problems largely born out of distance, communication, local conditions, and on-going instability”.

Practical obstacles, however, were not always the reason for unequal treatment. There was also the view that, since most of the African dead came from peoples that were not accustomed to burying the deceased and so would not appreciate marked graves, they should be commemorated on collective memorials. Thus, F. G. Guggisberg, Governor of what is now Ghana said in May 1923 that “the average native of the Gold Coast would not understand or appreciate a headstone”.

The report’s comment on this and similar perceptions is stern: “Sweeping judgements such as these, which chose to ignore the intricacies of faith, culture, and customs in Africa outside Christian and Islamic traditions, played a significant role in shaping the IWGC policies that led to unequal treatment”. Worse, they were not just innocently sweeping, for their failure to do justice to cultural particularities was rooted in an “overarching imperial ideology” that was based on ideals of progress and civilisation that generated hierarchies of race and religion. Here, then, is where “pervasive racism” is supposed to appear.

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Yet, it is notable that the report does not actually say that the views of the officials were empirically mistaken. That was wise, since it seems that the authors had not read any authority on the funerary customs of Africans — no such work appears in the report’s Select Bibliography. In fact, the ethnography of the period indicated that African peoples did often eschew burying their dead in marked graves. As reported in Volume IV of the 1911 edition of James Hastings’ classic Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, “the Masai, whose reason for not burying ordinary persons is said to be that the bodies would poison the soil, bury [only] their medicine-men and rich men”, while “some African tribes, as the Latuka and the Wadjagga, leave the slain warrior unburied”. Another group, “the Barotse … bury in secret, from which we may probably infer that the object is to leave no clue as to the burial place lest it be violated by wizards”.

Whereas the Commission’s report is quick to attribute the colonial officials’ view of African burial customs to imperial disdain for “primitive” peoples, in fact it might well have been born of close attention to them in the form of ethnographic research and direct experience. In their African colonies the British were so thin on the ground that their rule was only sustainable by persuading native peoples to cooperate. But in order to be persuasive, the British had to make themselves well-informed. For sure, African custom varied a lot over a vast continent, but if the quoted colonial officials were in fact mistaken about the burial customs of their war-dead, the report has not shown it.

However, allegedly ignorant claims by colonial officials about African burial customs are not the only evidence of the “pervasive racism” that the report claims to have exposed. Lying beneath them are the theoretical “hierarchies of race and religion that underpinned empire”. It is clear that the officials did regard the cultures of many African peoples as “primitive”. But I doubt they deserve blame for that, since — whether in terms of science, technology or medicine — African cultures were, compared to European ones, obviously underdeveloped in the 1920s. Moreover, when it came to deciding to commemorate the wartime sacrifice of native Africans collectively rather than with individual headstones, the reason was often respect for native custom, rather than disdain for it.

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Further still, it is most remarkable that discrimination was usually religious rather than racial. Thus, the IWGC regarded non-white members of the West India Regiment, the British West Indies Regiment, and South African units as Europeans, because they were presumed to be Christian (or Muslim) monotheists, according them individually named commemoration wherever possible.

Divergence from the norm in Europe because of serious practical difficulties or out of deference to native religious custom was not racist at all. What would have been racist is the differential commemoration of African or Indian dead because they were regarded as less worthy than their British or European counterparts simply on account of their ethnicity or race. Did that occur? The report does not present much unequivocal evidence of this, but it does present some. So, for example, at the Beira Christian cemetery in Portuguese East Africa, the graves of eighteen named native African soldiers were intentionally left unmarked — since the deceased were to be commemorated on the nameless Dar es Salaam African Memorial — while the graves of white South Africans and Europeans now remain.

In sum, then, what the Commission’s report actually shows is this. Operating out of the metropolitan heart of the British Empire, the IWGC was committed to the racially egalitarian policy of commemorating all the fallen soldiers of the Empire alike. This it did consistently in Europe, marking the known graves of individuals while naming those with no known grave on collective memorials, regardless of their race. Outside of Europe this policy was sometimes adjusted out of practical necessity or respect for native religious custom, with good moral justification. In certain cases, it seems to have been unjustifiably compromised by racist preference for Europeans. That was lamentable, but it does not add up to evidence of pervasive — far less, systematic — “apartheid in death”.

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Parts of the report confirms this conclusion. To assert the success of the policy of equal commemoration in Europe, it tells us, “is not to say that it was only there that the IWGC realised this goal or where it worked to make it a reality”. As for those occasions when it was set aside, it comments that “[i]n many ways it is understandable that IWGC operations during and following the First World War were not perfect”.

However, the report never quite manages to bring into clear focus the truth that not all inequalities are unjust — and that it pays no less respect to African or Indian fallen who would have received a headstone in northern France, to deny it to them in Africa or the Middle East, not because of their skin colour, but because of the dangerous remoteness of where they fell and were originally buried or out of deference to what was believed to be native custom. Because of its unresolved confusion on this ethical point, the report insinuates guilt where it should not, as when it writes that the IWGC was “complicit” in decisions that compromised its principles and treated the dead unequally.

When, to this ethical confusion is added the axiom of post-colonialist theory that the British Empire was informed by a single “imperial ideology”, which involved thinking of race and religion in terms of a fixed hierarchy of (white) superiority and (non-white) inferiority, the judgement is reached that the IWGC’s inequalities of commemoration were ultimately attributable to “pervasive racism”. Except that, as we have seen, that is not what the data says. So, this judgement does not follow from the evidence; it precedes it, and in doing so it brings with it its own, 21st-century, prejudice.

The reasons for his downfall have little to do with the truth about the past. The real Rhodes undoubtedly had a morally mixed record. But he was not South Africa’s Hitler, as the Rhodes Must Fall campaign has claimed. Far from being racist, he showed consistent sympathy for individual black Africans throughout his life. Nor did he attempt genocide against the Ndebele during their 1896 uprising — as activists have sometimes claimed — which might be suggested by the fact that the Ndebele tended his grave for decades. And he had nothing whatsoever to do with General Kitchener’s ‘concentration camps’ during the Boer War of 1899-1902, which themselves had nothing morally in common with Auschwitz.

Moreover, Rhodes did support a franchise in the Cape Colony that gave black Africans the vote on the same terms as whites. He gave financial backing to a newspaper, Izwi Labuntu, that was the voice-piece of one of several black African political associations that were the forerunners of the ANC. And he established his famous scholarship scheme, which was explicitly colour-blind and whose first black beneficiary was selected within five years of his death.

But none of this matters to the student activists baying for his downfall, or even to the professional academics who support them. Since I published my view of Rhodes, substantiated by evidence and argument, in the March 2016 issue of Standpoint, no one has offered any critical response at all.

Notwithstanding that, when the Rhodes Must Fall campaign revived four years later in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, the same old false allegations revived with it, utterly unchastened. Thus, according to the Guardian newspaper, an Oxford doctoral student (and former editor of the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal) was still slandering Rhodes as a “genocidaire” just last month.

What matters is not fidelity to the truth, but the exploitation of political advantage. The statue of Rhodes has been demonised into a totem of the colonialist mentality that allegedly feeds the ‘white supremacism’ infecting our institutions. Among these are the universities, where racial prejudice is said to manifest itself in the unequal representation of Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people among students and professors, and in the ‘Eurocentric’ bias of what is taught. Pulling Rhodes down is merely the first psychological blow in the war to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum.

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‘Decolonisation’ would involve admitting more BAME students, appointing more BAME professors, and increasing the quotient of BAME authors on reading lists. It would also involve correcting the national amnesia over the evils of colonialism, by promoting teaching about the history of British slavery, the historic root of the racism that reigns among us today.

Little of this makes sense, either empirically or historically. Empirically, the claim that the admission of students is racially biased doesn’t survive contact with reality. On the latest figures, the BAME population of people aged 19-26 in England and Wales is 18.3%, but the non-white undergraduate student intake in UK universities is 26.2%, and even at stereotypically elitist and hide-bound Oxford it is 22.1 per cent.

Moreover, 9.7% of BAME academic staff are professors, only 1.4 percentage points lower than their white peers. Within BAME groups, the professorial proportion of black staff is just under five per cent, but for their Chinese colleagues it is over 16% — much higher than for whites. These figures simply do not support the claim of structural racial bias in British universities.

As for curricula and reading lists, of course it’s important to grow a graduate citizenry that is aware of the riches of non-European cultures and of how the history of Britain is intertwined with the history of the globe. But that’s long been happening, and if suitable university applicants want to devote the entirety of their student careers to African, South Asian or Chinese studies, no one is stopping them.

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But does racial justice truly require proportionate representation of non-whites on all reading lists, regardless of the subject? Must teachers really make the skin colour and ethnic provenance of authors a criterion for recommending them to students? For sure, if I were teaching a topic in African history, Indian economics or Chinese literature, it would be odd — and maybe even suspect — if the list of authors I assigned my students was exclusively populated by ethnic Anglo-Saxons.

But if I’m teaching Cicero, or late medieval Italian literature, or the ethics of war, or molecular biology, or linear algebra, do I really have to spend my time ferreting out BAME authors who have written on these things? And must I assign them, regardless of whether I think that what they say is worth listening to, and, since all reading lists are finite, necessarily displacing others who have better things to say? Besides, what would ‘proportionate’ representation mean here? Proportionate in relation to what? The non-white portion of the UK population, or of the world, or of authors on the relevant topic? The more one thinks about it, the less thinking it bears.

What is more, a ‘Eurocentric’ bias in British education is surely justified. Britain is not Anywhere. It is located in north-west Europe, has a particular history, and has developed particular institutions and traditions. It’s vitally important, therefore, that school education, and even undergraduate studies, should focus on helping budding citizens understand the cultural and political environment for which they are about to become directly responsible — including the contemporary fact of ethnic diversity and its history.

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But whether they also need to have their noses rubbed in the facts of slavery, I doubt. It’s difficult to believe that many Britons know nothing about it or that many approve of it. But if they are going to learn more about the story of British involvement, they need to hear the whole story, not just the politically useful part. In addition to the appalling 200 years of transporting slaves to the West Indies and the American colonies, they need to hear about the dogged, 50-year campaign to abolish the trade and the institution within the British Empire two centuries ago.

And they also need to hear that British ‘colonialism’ then spent over a century in deploying the Royal Navy to stop slave-ships crossing the Atlantic and Indian oceans, and in suppressing the Arab slave-trade across Africa. Maybe they’d even learn that the Empire supported action against Arab slavers in Nyasaland in the 1880s through the British South Africa Company. And guess who ran the BSAC? Cecil Rhodes.