Afua Hirsch is no stranger to difficult conversations. It isn’t in her nature to back away from the daunting or the challenging.
Her new podcast takes a deep-dive into one of the touchiest subjects of all – Britain’s relationship with Empire.
At its peak, the British Empire covered 25% of the globe, but the implications of that power – and how it still affects us today – are rarely spoken about. It is a conversation that desperately needs to be had.
The author and former barista is pulling together some of Britain’s brightest stars to help unpick this country’s complicated and problematic relationship with Empire – including the real legacies of British colonialism that still exist today.
‘There is this narrative that Empire is ancient history,’ Afua tells Metro.co.uk. ‘But I feel really strongly that you can’t understand contemporary politics or society if you don’t understand the history of Empire.
‘The legacies of Empire are hugely present today.’
As a nation, we struggle to talk about race. It’s awkward, stilting, defensive. Our inability to talk about it perpetuates the systems that promote inequality – it’s a dangerous cycle.
Afua says this intrinsic awkwardness stems from our lack of knowledge about our own history.
‘We have all of these skeletons in the closet that we have never aired, from Empire and everything that happened under it,’ she explains. ‘I don’t think we are necessarily conscious of that, but it manifests in our inability to talk about race.’
It’s the conspicuous absence of Empire and British colonialism in our curriculums that has caused this lack of crucial understanding, says Afua. She looks at the gaping holes in her own historical education and can’t believe this issue hasn’t been addressed earlier.
‘At school, I’m not exaggerating to say that we went from the early Elizabethan era, the Tudors, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I – then we literally leap-frogged to the First World War,’ she says.
‘When you think about what was left out in the interim, it was that 300-year period of Empire building. It was the transatlantic trade of Africans that made Britain the industrialised country that could become such a dominant world power.
‘It took me a long time to understand how much I had not learned about. If you don’t know about something, it’s easy to dismiss it as not important.’
The fact that we don’t have a national museum of Empire is a sticking point for Afua. Where are the official records and memorials to this crucial part of this country’s recent history?
‘I’m not a conspiracist, but you do wonder whether it’s a coincidence that it has been systematically erased from our memory, our discourse, our museums,’ says Afua. ‘Even the buildings and the institutions that were such a key part of that story, they have just been quietly erased.’
Afua says it’s hard to understate just how much the legacies of Empire are informing our opinions and perspectives – in ways that we are still trying to understand. As a result, she says we are entering a new century ill-equipped to understand our current reality.
She says one implication of this is the visible thread of misplaced ‘imperial nostalgia’ that has been surfacing in recent political discourse.
‘It’s so important to interrogate that,’ says Afua. ‘People are nostalgic for a time when Britain was undoubtedly the most powerful nation in the world. But what was the basis for that power? What was the ideology of it?
‘How can you be nostalgic for something that was based on the idea of oppressing people of other races on the basis that they were not civilized?
‘We get away with it because we don’t understand it and we haven’t interrogated it.’
She says this concept has spilled over into the conversation about Brexit.
‘We have this idea of leaving the European Union and going it alone, but we were never alone,’ she continues. ‘Before we were in the EU, we were at the apex of an empire.
‘We couldn’t have won the two world wars without the resources and the dedication of life from people in the Empire.
‘It’s going to play out in the reality that we face when we leave the EU – we will see how much things have changed since the last time we were supposedly on our own.’
Afua’s new podcast, We Need to Talk About Empire, aims to bring the complex, diverse histories of Empire to a new audience. She aims to make this underexplored portion of history accessible through the use of fascinating human stories.
One contributor is poet and author Benjamin Zephaniah, who publicly rejected his OBE in 2003.
Zephaniah’s mother was a Windrush-era Jamaican immigrant. He explains how she unconsciously internalised a lot of the racism of Empire, and actually believed that British people were doing her a favour letting her come to the country.
When she received racist abuse she became almost apologetic for it.
‘That’s a story that many of us live with,’ explains Afua. ‘That our parents or grandparents were colonised, and that was only possible by making them believe, to some extent, in their own inferiority.
‘That is a psychological legacy of Empire that many of us still live with today, and these are the stories that don’t really get told.
‘It’s so interesting to hear someone like Benjamin Zephaniah, who is such a radical, anti-imperialist, anti-racist voice, talk about this nuanced relationship he has with his mother who is a kind of defender of Empire even though she is a victim of it.’
The problem with our understanding of Empire, says Afua, is that it is entirely oversimplified. And in that simplification, you lose the realities. She believes the only way to truly interrogate and understand the lasting implications of Empire is to introduce more layers of complexity.
‘The first key thing to understand is that there was no singular British Empire,’ Afua explains. ‘There were multiple British Empires, and those experiences – from India to Hong Kong to Africa to the Caribbean, are all incredibly different. There are all these really different diverse histories.
‘Because we don’t learn about it, it’s easy to over-simplify and turn it into a bit of a caricature.
‘People either think it was a good thing or a terrible thing. People get polarised in these really simplistic opinions. It’s important to understand how layered and complex the history really is.’
Without an understanding of our history of Empire, we have no context for understanding the makeup of our current society – and why we look like we do. This is where the narratives around issues like immigration can become skewed and weaponised.
‘The reason we are a multicultural society is because of the British Empire,’ she says. ‘The reason why so many immigrants came to this country is that they were born British.
‘They were born as British protected persons – which is what they were initially called in the Empire. Immigration and ignorance about the reasons for immigration, has been an existential issue in our contemporary politics.’
Understanding our own history is the first step towards making positive change for the future.
Afua believes that change is necessary and that we need to cultivate the tools to be able to talk about race more effectively.
‘We have quite a long journey to go on before we can even really have the right conversation,’ she says. ‘We need to start learning the history and learning the language and developing a better way of thinking about it – and all that takes time.’
We Need To Talk About The British Empire is available to download from 13 February on Audible.co.uk
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source https://metro.co.uk/2020/02/11/afua-hirsch-people-are-nostalgic-for-the-british-empire-but-how-did-we-get-that-power-12202027/
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