You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I was born in 1953. Post-war Britain was still labouring under the illusion that it was a principal global power with an unshakeable empire to match. Three years later the illusion was to collapse in the face of reality; the Suez crisis was the drama whose final act demonstrated an unforgiveable hubris on the part of the British government, humiliation on the world stage was guaranteed. What followed was an inexorable retreat from empire in the context of anti-colonial resistance movements and an incoming tide of anger on the part of the colonised. In 1968 the Labour government, under Harold Wilson, announced the comprehensive withdrawal of all British forces east of Suez, a tacit acceptance of British impotence and the end of empire.
This picture is not one that was available to me as a child. The truth as given to me throughout the fifties and sixties was very different and largely revolved around the notion of The Great British Empire upon which the sun never set. This truth also brought with it an implicit and often explicit message: to be British (and white) was to be not only fortunate, but somehow better. I learned that I was better than those who were ruled, better in the sense of moral substance and superior in terms of intellectual capacity. I never questioned this as a child and although I was unable to consciously articulate much of it, at an unconscious level I had internalised a colonial/colonist identity. An essential element in the architecture of this identity is the denigration of the other. The defining of the other as inferior and abject legitimises the colonist's belief in their inherent superiority.
This process of legitimation proved essential to the European colonial project from the sixteenth century to the twentieth and to the parallel barbarity of the transatlantic slave trade. If we are to imagine a country such as Britain during the earlier part of this period, we would see a society dominated by