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Personally, I'm all for a museum of the Empire

It would be a failure if it didn't show that good came out of the Imperial venture even though it was morally unforgiveable

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
Monday 17 June 2002 00:00 BST
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Here is a surprise. I support, yes support, the creation of a national museum to commemorate the British imperial project. This formative history underpins the relationship between Britons of all backgrounds and yet it has been buried (by an embarrassed left) and denied (by ideologically driven anti-racists) for decades, far too long. Time for us to step out and grab the project from the Right which is caught up in an incurably nostalgic enthusiasm and wants to erect a glorious and guilt-free monument to an invented past. Proud sons of Empire apparently want to build such a museum in Bristol in the original terminus of Brunel's Great Western Railway (what a wonderful choice) to remember the "achievements" of the biggest empire the world has seen.

The pioneers, including Sir Jack Hayward, the chairman of Wolverhampton Wanderers football club who likes to be known as "Union Jack", and the Conservative politician Kenneth Baker, have collected an impressive amount of private money already and they say they will open in September, even though the Millennium Commission and the Heritage Lottery Fund, chaired by Dr Eric Anderson, Tony Blair's old headmaster, turned down their application for funds. How short sighted. If they had given the project money, the Lottery Fund operators could have influenced the outcome and ensured that the history we get is as truthful and controversial and meaty and gritty as it needs to be. With this decision they have ensured that we will get a bogus history, as made up as the accolades draped around the last Empress of the Empire who left us this year.

This is a terrible abdication of responsibility. Historical memory is the backbone of any society. Ignorance about the complexities of history enables politicians and ultra-nationalists to exploit the people as they did in Bosnia and Rwanda and are now doing in India and across Europe. Some of the most wretched Muslim countries in the world deny their people access to a truthful history.

We are freer here than many such countries. What holds us back from confronting truths about the Empire is not censorship or even self-censorship, but an entire historical legacy which dwells only on the good that the Empire spread, and which is still sustained by traditionalists. They probably loved the much-criticised British Library exhibition of the East India Company in which it is described as a great and adventurous first "global" business. They will also have been enraged by Simon Schama, a brilliant historian and Burkean conservative, who was bold and honest enough this week to reveal the man-made starvation, the greed and exploitation which was also part of the story of the British in India, Ireland and Africa.

People need to understand the strange madness which fuelled the drive to control and to make money for individuals and this state. The archivist Roy Moxham, for example, wrote a book recently about a hedge built by the British in India of spiny plum and thorny acacia, 15 feet high and more than a thousand miles long. It was manned by 12,000 men who were collecting taxes which were depriving those already deprived. Moxham confesses: "I learnt a good deal more about the British in India. I had been looking for a folly, a harmless piece of English eccentricity. It was a shock to find that the great hedge was in reality a monstrosity; a terrible instrument of British oppression."

People in this country need to understand that nothing was genetic or inevitable about what happened. There is a telling segment in Laurence Sterne's 18th-century novel Tristram Shandy when two men discuss the state of "negroes". One says: " 'Tis the fortune of war which has put the whip into our hands now – where it may be hereafter, heaven knows!" Our children know much about American GIs but not of how millions of Africans, Indians and Caribbeans fought in the two world wars or that Mary Seacole, the mixed-race nurse from the Caribbean, did more good than Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, or that Asians have been here for 400 years. Other information may help present-day enmities. During the 17th century, Muslims and Europeans mixed, exchanged ideas and gifts freely and as equals. With both sides today fixated on the encounters of the Crusades, this knowledge may liberate more complicated and less convenient truths.

But I want the museum for a number of other reasons too. It would be a failure if it failed to show that much good came out of the imperial venture even though it was morally unforgivable. I wouldn't have this tongue, this gift of rich and expressive English. None of the early fighters against colonial rule – Nehru, Jinnah, Gandhi, Norman Manley, who became first minister of Jamaica – would have done what they did without the excellent liberal education they were given in Britain and the Inns of Court. Cornelia Sorabji, a beautiful Indian, challenged the system to became the first woman to study law in this country. Some of the best schools in the developing world were set up by missionaries and they still produce excellent results. A ruthless exposure of the weaknesses and collusion by the colonised themselves would have to be displayed and analysed however uncomfortable it makes black Britons feel. It still infuriates me that the British were so easily able to use hierarchies in the colonised countries to create dependent loyals – maharajahs, kings and chieftains – who served their cause instead of opposing it.

Even more controversially, we should have a section on post-colonialism, the stories of those who were left to fend for themselves (independence we called it then, foolishly. How we rejoiced – dancing and singing new anthems with lungs bursting full of optimism. Still in my head, the Ugandan national ditty – "Oh Uganda/Land of freedom/We lay our future in your hands/United free for Liberty") and to reconnect with a past which had been damaged by greedy and vainglorious Europeans. Most of the "liberated" countries have gone from bad to worse, their leaders corrupt, soulless and committing such crimes against their own people that many long for the imperialists to come back. This being Refugee Week we should remember just how much cruelty and mismanagement there is today in those countries.

This section would have to include post-colonial Britain too. Manifest destiny didn't last forever (thankfully) and although the rulers withdrew, the consequences of their ambitions linger on and on and on. Some of the children of the Empire struck back, moving lock, stock and barrel to the Motherland, making sure that the past would always be with us and indigenous Britons find themselves still captives of past habits. White Britons who write and talk about foreign places and alien faces – English boys from Balham telling us about their five minutes in Bollywood or sad stories about the blameless white children of apartheid – get more air time and column inches than those who could tell the story through black eyes. That may be what punters love, but perhaps this imperial museum could open up spaces for all those other stories which remain silent and unseen because they challenge lingering imperial fantasies.

So there's my manifesto. Now can I have the job of curator?

y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk

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