Britain: rainbow nation, racist background

Wembley, in north London, is one of the capital’s most diverse and congested corners; a cacophony of intersecting shopping malls, ethnic minority grocery stores, tube lines, traffic gridlock and 24-hour commuters. But at the turn of the 20th century, it was just a quiet civil parish on the edge of the countryside. Things changed, irreversibly, here in 1922, when construction begun on a project unlike any other—the 56 nation, 216-acre, £12m British Empire Exhibition, the “biggest fair Britain had ever known.”

The British government had briefly neglected its pro-Empire PR machine in the aftermath of the First World War, but it was kicked decisively back into action with this 1924 bonanza of imperial propaganda. This vast project included a Palace of Engineering six times the size of Trafalgar Square, a statue of the Prince of Wales made of Canadian butter, a reconstruction of the tomb of Tutankhamun, and Tibetan trumpeters.

Nothing, however, was more telling than the West African display. This covered a crucial economic link in the Empire. The Gold Coast (now Ghana) where my mother was born, was the colony which made the slaves, who made the sugar and cotton, which made the industrial revolution. At the time of the exhibition, it was still a highly lucrative source of gold and cocoa. By the time of the Second World War, it was the combined resources of the colonies that would repay Britain’s war debt to America. But there was, of course, no art, literature or invention on display: this section was nothing more than a bunch of mud huts. Craftsmen and bare-breasted women from the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and Nigeria were put on display, not unlike animals in a zoo, and elsewhere it provided a source of entertainment. “There you will find me in a costume gay,” sang a dance-hall musician, “in charge of the girls from Africa. All they wear is beads and a grin; that is where the exhibition comes in.”

The Empire Exhibition was phenomenally successful—27m people visited it, half of the population of Great Britain, reminding them of their inherent superiority, as a white race civilising backward savages overseas. This was an old message, but by 1924 it had been updated. This was Empire 2.0, one whose only interest, in the words of Nigeria’s Governor Frederick Lugard, was “to help the African and to serve him.” That spin was so effective that we are still living with it today.

As a black British girl of West African heritage growing up in London in the 1980s and 1990s, I was still unwittingly experiencing its effects. Like many of my generation, I was embarrassed to reveal that my family came from an African country, so strong was the association with untamed jungle, wild animals and savage customs. The only difference independence from colonial rule seemed to have made in the British imagination was the addition of psychopathic African dictators to the list of stereotypes. I was faced with puzzling preconceptions about the sexual and physical attributes of black women. In hindsight, these had survived intact from 1924.

The exhibition also convinced the British that the Empire had been founded as a kind of good-natured, Edwardian NGO, spreading enlightened British institutions around the world and placing Brits in their rightful place at its apex. Never has this idea been more apparent in my lifetime than today. When Boris Johnson finally came out in favour of Brexit in 2016, saying Britain would contribute to, rather than be inside, Europe, he consciously echoed Churchill. “We are with them, but not of them,” the old imperialist had said of Europe in 1953 adding, “We have our own Commonwealth and Empire.”

Nostalgia for Empire was both a symptom and a cause of the decision to leave the European Union. White, British identities have never recovered from the loss of the Empire, and the decline of its place on the world stage. Unlike other nations—Germany, Spain or Portugal, for example—our nostalgia afflicts not just the working class, but politicians and the middle classes too. A persistent, unchallenged belief in the intrinsic benevolence of British colonialism has fostered the remarkable belief that Britain doesn’t need integration in its own continent because it has the Commonwealth. One of the best expressions of this came courtesy of an A-level student appearing on a pre-referendum Question Time. These former colonies, this very young man said, “are loyal to our Queen… They will look after us.”

It’s logical for a British voter to regard the Commonwealth as a group of black and brown countries which—while we don’t want their economic migrants, refugees or even students—are pools of resource and bargain bucket trade deals to bolster our GDP. That, after all, is the role they historically served. And, in our recalcitrance in facing up to the truth, that legacy has never been called out for the racialised exploitation that it was.

That’s problematic for anyone interested in an honest appraisal of Britain’s past and present. It’s especially problematic for the descendants of immigrants, like me, who are British and need to reconcile the country of our nationality with its legacy in the nations of our heritage. As anyone from a visible minority in Britain will testify, it’s impossible to look “other” and be immediately accepted as being from this country.

The effect is a sense that “black” and “British” are irreconcilable. Some of us try to hyphenate our way around the problem. We’re “Black-British,” “British-Muslim,” even “Afro-Saxon.” The suspicion is that “Britishness,” on its own and in its current form is not an identity to which we can belong. It’s become popular among liberals to suggest that the growth in interracial relationships and mixed-race people will by itself turn our nation into a post-racial one. But unless the root of the issue is addressed, that doesn’t solve the problem; it simply compounds the number of people affected by it.

Britishness is an identity in crisis. Caught between those who hanker for empire, and those alienated by its legacy, the country is deeply confused by itself. The political manifestations of this could not be more dramatic. Nor could the cure be a more challenging one: a willingness to reframe what it means to be British. It’s a tough ask, but a task that it is no longer sustainable to avoid.