Must we mourn the late Queen of England?

The late Queen should have apologised for the harm the British empire has caused around the world

Major international media outlets in the English-speaking world have been obsessing over the demise of the Queen of England, the highlights of her 70-year reign, and the rituals surrounding her burial ceremony. However, the death of the English Queen has also evoked significant outpourings of nostalgic grief within former British colonies, which personally remains a bitter pill to swallow.

The adulation of Queen Elizabeth II within settler colonies like Australia and Canada makes some sense. The common feelings of loss or even grief being felt by the British themselves is also understandable.

However, not everyone in the West is a fan of the late Queen or of her long reign. Since her death about a week ago, some European and American scholars and activists have taken to social media and other public platforms demanding some accountability for the British monarchy’s reign over an empire which has exerted so much damage across the global south.

The cost of British colonialism is too extensive to be recounted here. Besides the brutal extraction of resources and labour from its colonies, British colonialism had an enduring legacy of seeding ethnic friction which continued to wreak havoc much after former British colonies gained independence. In Sri Lanka and Rwanda, for instance, the British propped up the Tamil and Tutsi minorities to rule over the Sinhalese and Hutu majorities which bred much resentment against these ethnic minorities. This manipulation of ethnic identities led to over two decades of civil war in Sri Lanka when the Sinhalese majority refused to accommodate the Tamil minority after the British left the country. Such divide and rule policies also became an underlying cause for the Rwandan genocide.

Queen Elizabeth II’s reign began after the 1943 famine of Bengal, which was caused by scarce food supplies being exported from drought-hit regions to stockpile grain for British troops under Churchill’s command. Her father was the King when the rushed independence of the Indian subcontinent took place accompanied by massive carnage on both sides of the border. However, Elizabeth II was the Queen during the Kenyan war of independence. It was under her reign that British colonial authorities in Kenya brutally suppressed the Mau Mau rebellion by creating detention camps, engaging in mass killings and using torture, rape and castration of suspected rebels and their sympathisers.

Some critics of the British monarchy have rightly pointed out that Queen Elizabeth II should have apologised for the British empire’s leading role in the slave trade and use of indentured labour on sugar, cotton and tea plantations, and for rail building projects, across colonies in the West Indies, Africa and Southeast Asia. She could also have tried to compensate in some way the countries which are still reeling from the after-effects of British exploitation. But she did neither.

Despite the tainted legacy of the British monarchy, diplomats around the world were still going to offer perfunctory condolences for the loss of the British Queen. However, the way some Pakistani leaders have reacted to the death of the British monarch is nothing short of embarrassing. There is no shortage of colonised minds within the citizenry and leadership, as evidenced by “mourning rituals” in private capacities, and the Pakistani leadership observing a day of mourning for the Queen this past Monday when the Pakistani flag was lowered to half-mast throughout the country. These acts were not only unnecessary, but a betrayal of all those who have fought to gain their independence from the empire represented by an unrepentant Queen. One of the most prominent politicians in our country tweeted how the millions of lives that Her Majesty touched shall “forever honour the monarch’s service to humanity (sic)”. This senior political leader also fondly alluded to the British compassion for the peoples of the Commonwealth which he felt had established “a legacy that history will remember in golden words”. That legacy should be remembered as one of oppression and exploitation instead.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 16^th, 2022.

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