By Brett Wilkins
September 11, 2022:
Information Clearing House
--
As
millions of Britons and admirers the world over
mourned Queen Elizabeth II’s death Thursday,
others — especially in nations formerly
colonized by the British Empire — voiced
reminders of the “horrendous cruelties”
perpetrated against them during the monarch’s
reign.
“We do not mourn
the death of Elizabeth, because to us her death
is a reminder of a very tragic period in this
country and Africa’s history,” declared Julius
Malema, head of the left-wing Economic Freedom
Fighters party in South Africa.
“Elizabeth ascended
to the throne in 1952, reigning for 70 years as
a head of an institution built up, sustained,
and living off a brutal legacy of dehumanization
of millions of people across the world,” he
continued.
“During her 70-year
reign as queen, she never once acknowledged the
atrocities that her family inflicted on native
people that Britain invaded across the world,”
Malema noted. “She willingly benefited from the
wealth that was attained from the exploitation
and murder of millions of people across the
world.”
“The British royal
family stands on the shoulders of millions of
slaves who were shipped away from the continent
to serve the interests of racist white capital
accumulation, at the center of which lies the
British royal family,” Malema added.
Larry Madowo, a CNN
International correspondent from Kenya, said during
a Thursday broadcast that “the fairytale is that
Queen Elizabeth went up the treetops here in
Kenya a princess and came down a queen because
it’s when she was here in Kenya that she learned
that her dad had died and she was to be the
queen.”
“But that also was
the start of the eight years after that, that
the … British colonial government cracked down
brutally on the Mau Mau rebellion against
the colonial administration,” he continued.
“They herded more than a million people into
concentration camps, where they were tortured
and dehumanized.”
In addition to
rampant torture — including the systemic
castration of
suspected rebels and sympathizers, often with
pliers — British forces and their local allies massacred unarmed
civilians, disappeared their
children, sadistically
raped women
and clubbed prisoners
to death.
“And so,” added
Madowo, “across the African continent, there
have been people who are saying, ‘I will not
mourn for Queen Elizabeth, because my ancestors
suffered great atrocities under her people that
she never fully acknowledged that.”
Indeed, instead of
apologizing for its crimes and compensating its
victims, the British government launched Operation
Legacy,
a massive effort to erase evidence of colonial
crimes during the period of rapid decolonization
in the 1950s-’70s.
“If the queen had
apologized for slavery, colonialism, and
neocolonialism and urged the Crown to offer
reparations for the millions of lives taken in
her/their names, then perhaps I would do the
human thing and feel bad,” tweeted
Cornell University professor Mukoma wa Ngugi.
“As a Kenyan, I feel nothing. This theater is
absurd.”
Aldani Marki, an
activist with the Organization of Solidarity
with the Yemeni Struggle, asserted that
“Queen Elizabeth is a colonizer and has blood on
her hands.”
“In 1963 the Yemeni
people rebelled against British colonialism. In
turn the Queen ordered her troops to violently
suppress any and all dissent as fiercely as
possible,” he tweeted. “The main punitive
measure of Queen Elizabeth’s Aden colony was
forced deportations of native Yemenis into
Yemen’s desert heartland.”
“This is Queen
Elizabeth’s legacy,” Marki continued. “A legacy
of colonial violence and plunder. A legacy of
racial segregation and institutionalized
racism.”
“The queen’s
England is today waging another war against
Yemen together with the U.S., Saudi Arabia and
the U.A.E.,” he added.
Melissa Murray, a
Jamaican-American professor at New York
University School of Law, said that
the queen’s death “will accelerate debates about
colonialism, reparations, and the future of the
Commonwealth” as “the residue of colonialism
shadows day-to-day life in Jamaica and other
parts of the Caribbean.”
Numerous observers
noted how the British Empire plundered around
$45 trillion from India over two centuries of
colonialism that resulted in millions of deaths,
and how the Kohinoor — one of the largest cut
diamonds in the world, with an estimated value
of $200 million — was stolen from
India to be set in the queen mother’s crown.
“Why are Indians
mourning the death of Queen Elizabeth II?” asked Indian
economist Manisha Kadyan on Twitter. “Her legacy
is colonialism, slavery, racism, loot, and
plundering. Despite having chances, she never
apologized for [the] bloody history of her
family. She reduced everything to a ‘difficult
past episode’ on her visit to India. Evil.”
An Indian
historian tweeted,
“there are only 22 countries that Britain never
invaded throughout history.”
“British ships
transported a total of three million Africans to
the New World as slaves,” he wrote. “An empire
that brought misery and famine to Asia and
Africa. No tears for the queen. No tears for the
British monarchy.”
Negative reaction
to the queen’s passing was not limited to the
Global South. Despite the historic
reconciliation between Ireland and Britain this
century, there were celebrations in Dublin — as
a crowd
singing “Lizzie’s
in a Box” at a Celtic FC football match attests
— and among the Irish diaspora.
“I’m Irish,” tweeted MSNBC contributor
Katelyn Burns, “hating the queen is a family
matter.”
Welsh leftists got
in on the action too. The Welsh Underground
Network tweeted a
litany of reasons why “we will not mourn.”
“We will not mourn
for royals who oversaw the protection of known
child molesters in the family,” the group said.
“We will not mourn
for royals who oversaw the active destruction of
the Welsh language, and the Welsh culture,” the
separatists added.
Summing up the
sentiments of many denizens of the Global South
and decolonization defenders worldwide, Assal
Rad, research director at the National Iranian
American Council, tweeted,
“If you have more sympathy for colonizers and
oppressors than the people they oppress, you may
need to evaluate your priorities.”
Brett Wilkins is
a staff writer for Common Dreams.
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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