The past is constantly being re-considered, revised and
rewritten. As new evidence appears – new sources or files are unearthed –
historians are given the chance to measure what they know about an
event and to test interpretations against the new information.
So for decades the generally accepted picture of the British Empire,
on which the sun never set, was that it brought free trade, Christianity
and education to India and Africa. When the indigenous populations
demanded independence and Macmillan’s “winds of change” swept over
Britain’s colonial possessions, they were handed over – in a largely
peaceful process – to local leaders.
So while the French were engulfed in the eight horrific years of the
Algerian War, the British handover of power was characterised by smiling
new leaders being photographed with the queen at meetings of the
Commonwealth.
Another way of looking at this story, however, was highlighted last year by the compensation paid to Kikuyu plaintiffs
in respect of torture they suffered in the 1950s, when British rule was
threatened by the Mau Mau. A different narrative began to emerge of
British colonialism, captured in titles such as David Anderson’s Histories of the Hanged, Caroline Elkins’ Britain’s Gulag and Ian Cobain’s Cruel Britannia.
The expulsion of the inhabitants of the British territory of Diego
Garcia to make way for a US naval base during the Vietnam War was
dramatised in Adrian Jackson’s A Few Man Fridays.
It appeared that the British Empire had kept itself on the road by
means of ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, torture and massacres.
Hidden cache of history
During the Mau Mau legal case it came to light that thousands of
government files relating to the colonial past had not been revealed,
let alone made public under the 1958 Public Records Act. Numbers of 8,000 or 9,000 were bandied about. More recently, Ian Cobain has suggested in The Guardian
that there may be over a million Foreign and Commonwealth files, some
going back to the Crimean War, hidden away at the ironically-named HMG
Communications Centre at Hanslope Park, near Milton Keynes.
On 22 January, 27 fellows of the British Academy, all practising historians, academic lawyers or political scientists, wrote to the Foreign Secretary
expressing their concern about the concealment of these files. Their
letter was published in The Guardian the following day. While aware of
existing advisory mechanisms, they have asked the government to explain
what material is being held and offered to assist in expediting the
process of releasing these documents to the public. A number of parties
are also exploring legal procedures to challenge exemptions claimed by
the government under the Public Records Act and more recent legislation.
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Why does all this matter? Our relationship with history never stands
still. The study of the colonial past of Britain and indeed of other
European countries has changed radically in the past 20 or 30 years, for
three reasons. First, public recognition of the evils of Holocaust has
forced a reconsideration of other examples of genocide, often committed
in post-colonial countries but not exempting colonial ones.
Second, in the study of the history, politics and literature of empire since Edward Saïd’s Orientalism and the “subaltern studies”
of the 1980s, a post-colonial critique of colonial rule and the
colonial legacy in the contemporary world has been developed around
Indian-born intellectuals now with chairs in the US, such as Gayatri Chakravorty and Homi Bhabha.
Third, since the end of the Cold War, the preservation of human
rights has been a touchstone in national and international affairs.
Regimes are assessed not only in terms of their power and wealth but in
terms of their human rights record. This applies as much to the UK as to
Russia and China.
Public interest
So what is at stake here? Why can we not simply agree with the line
that national security requires official secrecy and that some questions
in the past should not be pried into too closely? There are two
reasons, which relate to both the nature of our democracy and to the
world we live in.
To begin with, an obsession with official secrets betrays an
authoritarianism that undermines free society and a paternalism that
reduces citizens to subjects. There is a sharp contradiction when GCHQ operations tell us
that the government will stop at nothing to unearth information about
its own and other people, while people’s right to call their government
to account for past actions is stone-walled.
That secrecy, moreover, removes the right to justice of former
colonial peoples who have been abused. Today, they can no longer be
trampled upon or ignored, and in our multi-cultural and multi-faith
societies they and their descendants live, not somewhere else, but among
us. Is it surprising that a sense of injustice sometimes leads to acts
of violence against former colonial powers or that racial troubles erupt
in our suburbs? The release of these papers to enable scholarly
research and a mature debate about Britain’s role in the world will be a
tribute both to democracy and to justice.
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