Many Europeans (former colonisers) may pretend to oppose racism or colonialism or have Africa's best interests at heart. However, if we're honest, they privately view it is as an unfortunate, homogenenous dump that they feel lucky not to have been born into, which has no hope of achieving prosperity, and which was put on the path of righteousness by European "morality", as though that is anything but a sickening irony.
As you pointed out, Belgium killed more people in the Congo than died in the Holocaust. Yet about nobody gives a fig about European crimes in Africa because Africa does not matter. Has Belgium or any of the other European countries who plundered this continent ever taken a long, hard look in the mirror about it? No. In fact, they are genuinely shocked and outraged to find out that others don't love them as much as they love themselves. The only thing that might inspire any kind of concern is the thought that another country (e.g. China) might start to gain influence in Africa at the expense of the continent's rightful owners.
This highlights a fundamental lack of self-awareness, general ignorance of how others elsewhere perceive them, delusions of superior morality that have no basis in reality, or twisted narratives of history.
In fact, while of course there are bad places in Africa - the continent is developing - most places are nothing like the popular image of a kwashiorkor-afflicted hellhole policed by child soldiers and filled with people who have no prospects.
Europhiles tend to think that Europe is God's gift to the world to civilise it. Yet closer to the truth is a narrative of barbarians who, having plundered everything of value and destroyed everything of beauty elsewhere, sit on their pile of treasure and scream about how great they are, while expecting others to be impressed.
Europhile narcissism is a disease upon the planet. But Europe's days, or rather centuries, of horror as rulers of the planet have come and gone, and pride comes before a fall.
This is indeed a moving article, and in most respects nuanced and complex. One cannot but feel respect for the author as he details the experiences that have shaped him. As a Briton, one cannot help but feel shame. It's also hard, if one does not share his heritage and history, to know quite how to respond if one differs from his conclusions.
I suppose where I part company with the author is when he writes (or rather, to be precise, when he quotes approvingly) that the Cecil Rhodes statue in Oxford is “an open glorification of the racist and bloody project of British colonialism”, and appears to support the protestors' argument that it should be removed to a museum. For Dr Chigudu, the statue's presence on the facade of Oriel College continues to celebrate the colonialism in which its subject participated, and its removal is a step in a process of decolonisation.
But for me, removing the statue to a museum would be the choice that allows Britons to forget the colonial past. Right now, people who live in or visit Oxford are confronted by the legacy of colonialism whenever they walk down its High Street. Looking up at the facade of Oriel College, seeing Rhodes in his exalted position (his is the highest statue of several on the facade - higher even than those of the reigning monarchs of the time), they are obliged to reckon with the fact that the British colonial project was once - within the lifetime of the great-grandparents, grandparents or even parents of many now living - considered worthy of surpassing celebration. When that statue is removed, this reckoning will no longer take place.
I myself have frequently walked along Oxford High Street. Passing Oriel, I have felt troubled by a sense of complicity, by the way in which the cruelties of colonialism are inextricably bound up with the noble ideals of education. I remember Walter Benjamin's famous observation that "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." The presence of that statue is a salutary warning against merely taking pride in the university, its architectural beauty, and its status as a seat of learning. It's a visible reminder of the darkness that underlies those things. That reminder should, I believe, remain visible. Dr Chigudu talks of removing it to a museum. But the most informative of all museums is the world in which we live.
In 2013, I spent the summer travelling around Ukraine (then still including Crimea). It was fascinating to trace the country's divisions and ideological conflicts reflected in the statues in the city streets. In Lviv, you could see Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko; in Odessa, Pushkin. Catherine the Great was on a pedestal in Odessa too. Lenin was in Yalta, opposite the then still functioning McDonalds; Lenin was then also in Kiev. Less than four months after my visit, that statue was gone, in what escalated into a broad purge of Soviet monuments - from 2015, under the Decommunisation programme sponsored by the Poroshenko administration, it became mandatory. I'm glad I was there when it was still possible to trace the complexities of Ukraine's history in the open-air museum of its cities and streets.
In the end, I suppose, Lenin and Cecil Rhodes teach us the same message - they remind us how much evil can be done by men who were convinced they were doing good.
@ashiitaka saidEurope did a very efficient job of destroying much of its own heritage in two world wars and in the soulless process of modernisation that afflicted its cities in the 1960s and thereafter - the latter as great a cultural crime as has ever been committed in time of peace.
Yet closer to the truth is a narrative of barbarians who, having plundered everything of value and destroyed everything of beauty elsewhere, sit on their pile of treasure and scream about how great they are, while expecting others to be impressed.
The sad truth is that the destruction of the heritage of many non-Western societies has been from both without and within. The British destroyed the Old Summer Palace in Beijing; Mao's regime destroyed the walls of the city, described by architect Edward Bacon as "man's greatest single architectural achievement on the face of the Earth". Truman's secretary of state, Henry Stimson, removed Kyoto from the list of Japanese targets for the atom bomb, declaring its heritage to be a treasure for all humanity; seventy years ago the city was still almost intact. One can still see the great temples today; but virtually all its wooden streets were eroded in postwar redevelopment.
Total war, colonialism, Communism, capitalism have all participated in destroying the museum that was the world. Does modernity as a whole really have very much to boast of?