UK Monarchy narrated from Kenya
From May, 2023:
.> This weekend, the British will be asking the world to join in celebrating something they have actively denied to other societies – a sense of their own history.
.> Before his anointment, Charles III, like his predecessors, will take the Coronation Oath – pared down to reflect the loss of empire. It is the only bit of the ceremony that is actually required by law.
.> On the African continent, as the late Professor Terence Ranger noted, British colonial administrators had “set about inventing African traditions for Africans”. These subjects were in fact taught that they had no history or achievements, and that the brutal colonial dispossession and occupation was actually for their benefit – that it helped to civilise them.
.> In Kenya, as Timothy Parsons, Professor of African History at Washington University in St. Louis, notes, “faced with a confusing range of fluid ethnicities, [British] colonial officials sought to shift conquered populations into manageable administrative units”. In the process, they linked land to ethnic identity, creating a system that assumed each of these fictional ‘tribes’ had a specific homeland.
.> the British divided Kenya into 41 administrative districts and the country eventually ended up with nearly the same number of official “tribes”.
.> ... the persecution of sexual minorities, often justified using colonial ideas of Africa as populated by “noble savages” instinctively upholding supposedly natural Victorian ideals about sex and needing to be protected from Western corruption, is a direct consequence of the erasure of African history.
.> This reinvention of the monarchy as global entertainment has helped to shield it, and the country it leads, from the more unsavoury bits of its history, such as the links to the slave trade. And certainly, true remembrance of the actions taken by British officials in their monarch’s name in the colonies is made harder by the wholesale and deliberate theft, concealment and destruction of documents.
.> As the British Empire crumbled, thousands of documents detailing some of its most shameful acts and crimes committed were systematically destroyed, or transferred discretely to the UK and hidden in a secret Foreign Office facility, to prevent them falling into the hands of post-independence governments. The existence of this stolen record, euphemistically called the “migrated archive”, kept at the highly-secure government communications centre at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire, was only officially admitted in 2012 following a lawsuit by Kenyans who were detained and tortured during the Mau Mau Emergency of 1952-1957.
The coronation of King Charles: A fresh layer of royal whitewash
This weekend’s spectacle is the latest episode of the world’s longest-running reality show.
