Before we leave Ireland I have a final proposal for writers of history from now on, and it relates to the words which we use to describe the past. On 1 January 1801 the Acts of Union took effect, which united Great Britain with Ireland as a single state – the United Kingdom. The Parliament in Dublin was subsequently abolished, with 100 Irish MPs now sitting in the House of Commons. This constitutional state of affairs only ended with the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922. Therefore we must understand that when the Famine ravaged Ireland from 1845 to 1852, it happened in the United Kingdom. The policies which exacerbated the Famine were created in London, at the heart of the empire. The Poor Law commissioners were appointed by Whitehall. The army and police who carried out the clearances of cottages were paid out of British taxation. So, shouldn’t we from now on start to use language which reflects these realties? The Famine was not Irish, it was British. Our language needs to reflect this – we should begin to speak about ‘the British Famine’, or for those who want to be more precise, ‘the British Famine – in Ireland’.
PART FOUR
* * *
The Breaking of Silences
‘What at one time one refuses to see never vanishes but returns again and again, in many forms.’
‘Whenever a secret is kept it will makes its way, like an object lighter than water and meant to float, to the surface.’
The Breaking of Silences
10
Moments of Seismic Shift: 7 December 1970, Warsaw; 2 June 2005, Belgrade; 14 August 2004, Okakarara; 14 July 2016, Berlin
Britain occupies a uniquely dangerous, and deluded, position in relation to its past. This is more than a question of silences at the heart of the British national narrative – the glaring gaps which I’ve written about in the preceding chapters are only part of the problem. Because not only do we come from a culture that has allowed genocide, slavery and mass killing to be done in its name – indeed which has benefited like no other country on the planet from systematic and extremely violent colonialism – we then have the temerity to pass moral judgements on other nations. Before we’ve even begun any serious process of re-examination of our own history. Look at British coverage of the Second World War and you will nearly always hear a combination of moral smugness (about ourselves) and rampant judgementalism (about others). The fact we have not been invaded for almost 1,000 years means that we have no conception at all of the moral chaos and dilemmas that such a situation brings. And so you have the familiar spectacle of British historians and writers and politicians disapproving of French collaboration, bemoaning Polish antisemitism and laughing at Italian fascism – all from a pedestal made from the most rotten materials. For do we really believe we would have behaved any differently?
This question seems to me the great value of Madeleine Bunting’s 1995 book on the occupation of the Channel Islands, The Model Occupation: The Channel Islands Under German Rule, 1940–1945 – which serves as a corrective to the myth that the British would have resisted more, collaborated less. That we wouldn’t have allowed concentration camps in our midst. It is sobering to be reminded that over 1,000 people (primarily Russian slave labourers) died on Alderney between 1942 and 1945, ‘the greatest mass murder which has ever occured on British soil’, as Bunting rightly points out. And in a culture that is obsessed by two world wars and the importance of Remembrance Day, it is shocking to learn that these victims do not even have a proper memorial. This tells us a huge amount about our collective memory, and about our self-identity, the myths we want to keep intact, and the realities we want to avoid facing:
Tangible evidence of the selectivity of the islanders’ history is that there are no public memorials to the slave labourers … [This] leaves survivors like Otto Spehr baffled. In Germany, Spehr points out, the sites of SS camps have become carefully tended gardens of remembrance, often with well-funded museums and archives attached. But the site of the SS camp on Alderney is a wasteland covered with brambles. Spehr enlisted the help of Chancellor Willi Brandt, and the German government agreed to put up half the funding for a memorial on the site of Sylt, but Spehr claims Alderney refused to consider the idea.
She ends with these reflections on the selective memory of the islanders and how the past is seen:
It is in their failure to remember and acknowledge those who were sacrificed … that the islanders must be judged. How can they belittle the suffering of the slave labourers? … How could Therese Steiner, Marianne Grunfeld and Auguste Spitzfn1 be forgotten for 40 years? … Only when there are exhibits in all the islands’ museums to these people, and well-cared-for memorials and plaques in their memory, only when islanders talk as freely about the Jews as they do about how they made tea out of bramble leaves, will they have begun to tell the story of the Occupation.fn2
And, moving on to the post-war period, I have heard supposedly serious British historians argue that one of the reasons that Britain is less hated for its colonial legacy than some other countries was that after the Second World War it knew ‘the game was up’ and so divested itself of colonies ‘with minimal violence’. Try telling that to the people of Kenya. In the early 1950s, Kenya was struggling for its independence and Britain responded with an extraordinary level of brutality, only beginning to be understood today. According to recent academic studies, more than 100,000 Kenyans were killed, some through shootings and beatings, many by slave labour – a programme of ‘extermination through work’ which the SS would have been proud of.fn3
To give just a single example: the building of Nairobi’s international airport at Embakasi between 1953 and 1958 cost many hundreds of lives through slave labour and exhaustion. The concentration camp for the slave labourers, next to the airport site, was dubbed ‘Satan’s Paradise’ by the inmates. The historian Caroline Elkins relates that pressure to complete the building of the airport combined with ‘the pervasive exterminationist attitude toward Mau Mau’ created nightmarish conditions. ‘Camp commandants … seemed to consider it their duty to work the convicts to death.’ One eyewitness, Nyaga Ng’Endu, recounts what happened on a daily basis:
Every working detail had to have fifty prisoners. By noon of each working day up to six or seven prisoners had died. If a prisoner died it was the men in his group who would put his body onto the vehicle that would come round collecting the bodies.
Molly Wairimu, another witness:
The lorry would tip the bodies into a ditch and then drive off. If many people had died the lorries would come at ten in the morning and then at two in the afternoon. On days when not as many people had died only one lorry would come, but with bodies heaped to the top and with planks of wood along the sides to prevent them from falling off. They never used to bury the bodies, they were just dumped like logs until the ditch was full – higher than this house.fn4
The propaganda back in Britain in the early 1950s heavily emphasised the ‘viciousness’ of the Mau Mau guerrillas fighting the British settlers in Kenya, and the war against this ‘evil’ that Britain was fighting. It is true that around 100 British farmers and settlers were killed in this period, but the reprisals for these killings were out of all proportion – a thousand times greater. It was not just a matter of killings – the brutality of British treatment went beyond comprehension. Paul Muoka Nzili was imprisoned at Embakasi in 1957 and one day was pinned to the ground and castrated with pliers, by a certain Mr Dunman. In 2010 Nzili wrote, ‘It took years for me to find any hope, but I have never really recovered from what was done to me at Embakasi on that day.’fn5 And it is important to remember that this was happening only a dozen years after the Nuremberg Trials, when Britain and the other Allies had prosecuted senior Nazis for what were rightly called ‘crimes against humanity’.