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Ed Edwards<\/strong> asks how does a dramatist create realistic characters in the\u00a0<\/em>context of Empire and the end of Empire?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n When I first became aware of the horrors of capitalism and the brutal role the British state played in creating and maintaining the system worldwide, I started to hate films about Britain\u2019s evil colonial past. Whatever the crimes and\/or prejudices portrayed in such films \u2013 see Passage to India<\/em>, Gandhi<\/em>, etc. \u2013 they always seemed to come with a secret message: \u2018Look how cruel we were back in the days of Empire, aren\u2019t we so much more enlightened now?\u2019<\/p>\n As a left dramatist I was desperate to avoid the same mistake in my own work. But the more I learned about Britain\u2019s vampiric past, the more I realised there are problems for writers creating stories at the End of Empire \u2013 i.e. about the present. The more I looked, the more I became aware that the Empire has only really changed its clothes and leaders \u2013 slipped on a cloak of invisibility \u2013 but underneath the shiny modernity, the decaying and parasitic beast that used to be called Empire, is alive and still kicking. Just hidden.<\/p>\n So, as a dramatist who has to create realistic characters in these circumstances, I have questions:<\/p>\n On the plus side for dramatists, writing \u2018character\u2019 mostly means writing what our protagonists do and say. So pretty much if you can identify that, you\u2019ve nailed it. In other words, rather than trying to grasp ever-mysterious and illusive psychological characteristics to determine character <\/em>\u2013 desire, libido, ego, instinct, the death drive, etc. \u2013 dramatists can pretty much say, \u2018This is what they did, and this is what they said.\u2019 Easy.<\/p>\n The tricky part of writing character is context<\/em>. Which changes everything. For example, the character <\/em>of two lovers in a street staring into each other\u2019s eyes and then kissing passionately looks very different if we \u2018pull back to reveal\u2019 people being hanged from a makeshift gallows nearby, operated by our lovers\u2019 mates. But what if the victims of the hanging are fascists who have murdered all of our lovers\u2019 friends and family? Or the hanging is happening in the next street, the victims are innocent, and our lovers are unaware it is happening at all because they are so obsessed with kissing each other? What if we then realise our lovers know what\u2019s happening in the next street, but don\u2019t really care because they only believe in love? Or our lovers are under armed guard, they know damn well it\u2019s happening in the next street and that they are next? Or, after the kiss, our lovers pull out guns and set off to rescue the innocent victims of the hangings in the next street with a cry of \u2018Freedom or death!\u2019In each case we feel differently about our lovers and their kiss. In each dramatic vignette they are different characters.<\/p>\n You get the point. But what if the writer <\/em>of the scene doesn\u2019t know there are hangings in the next street and is only interested in our characters and their kiss? That\u2019s when context gets complex, it\u2019s easy to mess up and it all gets very postmodern. So in order to answer my questions I need some proper context. I need to give a brief account of the British Empire and what became of it. Then ask questions about writing drama in that context.<\/p>\n Two acts. Empire. End of Empire. This will be ridiculously inadequate as history, but dramatists are allowed to do this shit and call it a provocation. Plus there\u2019s loads of notes for fact-checking and further reading if you want to know more, or don\u2019t believe me. Oh, and the original idea for England & Son <\/em>was: a horror story in which all the horrors are real<\/em>. What follows is a horror story in which all the horrors are real. Fetch the garlic.<\/p>\n Concerning Violence<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n A month after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Hitler declared, \u2018What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us.\u20191<\/sup><\/p>\n Unfortunately for the world, though, a century beforehand, when the British carried out their robbery and slaughter in India, there was no Soviet Red Army to drive them out and crush them like the beasts they were. Writing about British violence in India at the time of Empire, Karl Marx described the capitalist class of his day as travelling \u2018from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked\u2019.2<\/sup> That they did. So if you don\u2019t like nudity, look away now.<\/p>\n A few years after Marx\u2019s remark, in 1857, when Queen Victoria\u2019s Empire was nearing its height after a hundred years of robbery and violence by the private armies of the East India Company, poorly armed Indians known as sepoys \u2013 actually Indian soldiers used by the British to force their will on India \u2013 launched a rebellion to liberate India from British domination. In response, the British behaved like the Nazis in Eastern Europe during World War II.<\/p>\n Following imperial orders, Colonel James Neill \u2013 a devout Christian and British army officer \u2013 instituted a reign of terror against the civilian population in the vicinity of the sepoy mutiny. At least six thousand men, women and children were killed pretty much straight away. Local British volunteers set up \u2018hanging parties\u2019 and lynched hundreds, including children. Colonel Neill then sent his soldiers to destroy all the villages in the neighbouring district. \u2018Slaughter all the men, take no prisoners\u2019 were the orders. The soldiers were to make a particular example of the town of Futtehpore with \u2018all in it to be killed\u2019.3<\/sup> A horrified witness suggested that women who refused to leave their burning houses met a kinder fate than other women who were \u2018ravished to death\u2019 by British soldiers.4<\/sup><\/p>\n Following similar gut-wrenching scenes throughout the whole of India, the final stronghold of the sepoy rebellion \u2013 the city of Delhi \u2013 was destroyed utterly by the British Army, alongside many other towns and ancient cities. Thousands of buildings were set alight with families still inside. Tens of thousands of villagers were murdered. Homes and cattle in adjoining districts were destroyed, whole populations were driven out of their ancient homelands to live and die in destitution. There were mass hangings, mass incidents of murderous rape and public torture. Thousands of prisoners were killed horribly, many of them loaded into big guns and fired from them.5<\/sup> And that was just the start.<\/p>\n Shortly after the Indian rebellion began, a shocking story about a massacre of surrendered British women and children by Indians was circulated, causing widespread revulsion among whites. Back in Britain, Charles Dickens himself declared a longing for \u2018the opportunity to exterminate the race (of Indians) upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested\u2026 To blot (the Indian race) out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth.\u20196<\/sup> The former Governor General of India called in the House of Lords for every man in Delhi to be castrated and for the city to be renamed \u2018Eunuchabad\u2019.7<\/sup><\/p>\n But as with similar media tricks today, the details were distorted. The massacre of a few tens of British civilians actually happened after <\/em>the India-wide murderous rampage by the British had already begun \u2013 epitomised by good Christian Colonel Neill\u2019s expeditions of extermination. Plus, in any event, the murders were carried out by the henchmen of a local prince, previously a collaborator with British rule, who had belatedly joined the revolt and who fully expected to be massacred themselves by British troops who were on their way to do just that.8<\/sup><\/p>\n Recent research by the Indian historian Amaresh Misra suggests in the decade after the 1857 rebellion, the slaughter of Indians ran to as many as ten million men, women and children, as the British launched what was effectively a genocidal war after Queen Victoria\u2019s army took over direct rule from the mercenaries of the East India Company.9\u00a0<\/sup>The orgy of British violence sparked by the Indian Great Rebellion of 1857 did not spring from nowhere. Such gruesome violence had been commonplace in India for the previous hundred years where any hint of rebellion was put down with maximum cruelty as an example to others.<\/p>\n The British behaved as brutally in China, Arabia and northeast Africa as they did in India,10<\/sup> where again the figures rival or even dwarf the Nazi rampage in Eastern Europe a hundred years later. And of course, the bloody conquests of India and China happened at the same time as the development of the plantations in the West Indies, where every torture was used to eke more work out of slaves transported from Africa, or to deter slave rebellions, or put down rebellions once they occurred \u2013 which they did with increasing frequency throughout the period.<\/p>\n Such slave revolts \u2013 usually very much less violent than their suppression \u2013 were inspired at least in part by the abolitionist movement among the English working class, who were themselves at that moment organised in revolt against the brutalities of the factory system centred on Manchester.11<\/sup> The English factory system itself was only made possible by the seed capital, earned through slavery and colonial plunder, then re-invested into machinery and industrial infrastructure on a scale never before seen in human history.<\/p>\n As slaves on British plantations lost their fear of death and became ever more determined to strike for freedom, so the brutalities inflicted on them reached ever lower depths of cruelty. The British politician and supporter of slavery Bryan Edwards captured this duality of cruelty and defiance when he described seeing a risen Jamaican slave punished by fire. The slave was held down and his legs were burned to ashes while he \u2018uttered not a groan\u2019 and somehow \u2018snatched a brand from the fire that was consuming him and flung it in the face of the executioner\u2019.12<\/sup><\/p>\n It was this emergence of capital out of the profits of slavery, violence, colonial plunder and the brutalities of the early factory system in England that Karl Marx was referring to when he famously wrote that capitalism \u2018comes into the world… dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt\u2019.13<\/sup><\/p>\n The British slave owners who in the face of increasing revolts eventually and reluctantly \u2018gave up\u2019 slavery were massively compensated for their financial losses by the British state. The last payments of this vast booty \u2013 as the comedian and activist Mark Thomas pointed out in his recent show 50 Things About Us <\/em>\u2013 were only made in 2015. The slaves got nothing.<\/p>\n Can someone please research who exactly received these payments, where they live and organise demonstrations outside their houses until they agree to pay back every penny with two hundred years of interest? Cheques payable to whom? Discuss. Oh, and don\u2019t forget if you are going to carry out a protest in Britain today you must inform the police who have the right to dictate where you protest, how many people can attend, the form it must take and whether you can make any noise. If you defy them you could face a jail sentence and\/or unlimited fines.14<\/sup><\/p>\n Such historic violence by the British Empire was repeated in Asia, Arabia and Africa over approximately three hundred years of Empire from roughly the 1750s to the 1960s. The more the resistance, the greater the British violence.<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth ending these notes concerning violence with a recognition that most of the history of this violence is ignored by the majority of historians of Empire. As the anti-colonial writer and professor John Newsinger remarks: \u2018It is a hidden history\u2026 Book after book remains silent on the subject.\u201915<\/sup> Surely one of the most vile of these non-histories is Niall Ferguson\u2019s 2003 book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World<\/em>, which regurgitates for the modern audience all the cliches that the colonised benefitted from being colonised despite some inevitable cruelty.16<\/sup>\u00a0<\/p>\n This gaslighting about Empire is about what happened a hundred and fifty years ago. No wonder what happens at the End of Empire \u2013 in our own time \u2013 is so hard to discern.<\/p>\n Concerning Economics<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n In terms of human tragedy, arguably the most destructive violence of the British Empire was economic. The misery and death caused by the economic exploitation of a fifth of the world\u2019s population by one class of one small nation off the coast of continental Europe \u2013 through rent and mineral extraction, tributary taxation, slavery, unfair trade, financial swindling and downright robbery \u2013 was worse than the horrors used to enforce it all.<\/p>\n Take the fate of poor Mr Duffy who lay dying of starvation in his freezing dwelling during the Irish famine of the mid-1840s, obviously unable to pay his rent. His landlord, one Mr Walsh, like hundreds \u2013 perhaps thousands \u2013 of his fellow landlords at the time, used the famine as an opportunity to clear the land of poor tenants whose families had lived there for generations but who were now too broke to pay decent rents. The sheriff whose duty it was to execute the eviction, seeing the desperate state of Mr Duffy, hesitated to enforce the order. But, as the parish priest reported later, the landlord\u2026’was inexorable. Duffy was brought out and laid under a shed… once used as a pig cabin and his house (was) thrown down. The landlord, not deeming the possession complete while the pig cabin remained entire, ordered the roof to be removed and poor Duffy, having no friend to shelter him, remained under the open air for two days and two nights, until death put an end to him’.17<\/sup><\/p>\n The so-called ‘Potato Famine’ killed a million Irish people while, at a conservative estimate, enough food was exported to England to feed the population of Ireland three times over.18<\/sup> The Prime Minister of England was himself an evicting landlord. Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston had two thousand of his own starving Irish tenants deported to Canada promising publicly to pay each of them \u00a32 to \u00a35 pounds on arrival. But at the other end no one turned up with the money.19<\/sup><\/p>\n Naturally such evictions provoked the murder of some landlords, including one Major Denis Mahon of County Roscommon, who had paid passage for some five hundred of his tenets on a \u2018coffin ship\u2019, as such vessels were known. Over 150 of Mahon\u2019s emigrants were dead by the time the vessel docked in Canada and most of the survivors subsequently died too. Mahon was, of course, celebrated in the British press as a humane landlord cut down by a murderous assassin urged on by the parish priest.20<\/sup><\/p>\n Such was the economic plight of the Irish whose land was emptied many times over by individual economic miseries heaped on it over two centuries by the Empire. At one million dead over a few years, the famine was only the most cataclysmic and collective low point.<\/p>\n Now zoom out and multiply by thirty to fifty. By the 1870s \u2013 the year the \u2018scramble for Africa\u2019 began in earnest \u2013 two hundred years of colonial economic disruption in India and China had destroyed utterly the traditional village economies with their ancient safeguards against disease and famine, replacing them with nothing of use to the indigenous populations. So, when the great droughts of the period struck in 1876 and again in 1899, accompanied by hugely destructive epidemics of malaria, bubonic plague, dysentery, smallpox and cholera, the results were cataclysmic. It is estimated by the most recent research that a staggering thirty to fifty million Indians and Chinese died of disease and starvation while British administrators and Empire soldiers fought only to protect the recently established free-market mechanisms and only used the opportunity to strengthen their hold on the countries\u2019 economies.21<\/sup><\/p>\n In the 1800s, the Indian cotton industry was destroyed by cheap cotton imports from Manchester, throwing millions into destitution. Opium grown in India helped bring China to its economic knees and created the greatest opium epidemic in history. It also helped England balance its international payments for tea which before the Opium Wars was draining Britain of gold and silver.22<\/sup> The profits of the opium trade also paid for the upkeep of the British government of India.23<\/sup> Over the period of British domination, India\u2019s domestic share of world trade plummeted from 25% to 2%.24<\/sup><\/p>\n By 1870, Britain faced fierce competition from other European and US capitalists who wanted in on the game. These powers concentrated industrial manufacture in their own countries and took what they needed from their colonies to feed the vast machinery of wealth creation.25<\/sup> The super-profits earned in the colonies by Europeans enabled the Industrial Revolution to really take off and transform the Empire heartlands into the commodity-and-infrastructure rich world we know today \u2013 while the rest of the world went to shit.26<\/sup><\/p>\n Concerning Character<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n There are huge and important questions about who has the right \u2013 or who does not have the right \u2013 to tell the story of the colonial oppressed. But here I\u2019m really talking about creating Western characters in Western drama. The rest is context. So, what of the character of the early capitalist class who did all the raping and killing and living off the proceeds? At the height of their extravagant, worldwide orgy of exploitation, swindling, robbery, rape and other violence, did these grotesque beings walk around growling like demons, dripping blood from their talons, biting the heads off babies on the streets of London, Bristol, Liverpool and Manchester?<\/p>\n In fact, they were the most respected, venerated, fashionably dressed and publicly minded gentlemen of their age. They had great manners. Many were writers, poets and sponsors of public works. They were devout church and theatregoers and a good catch for a potential wife. Take Captain Wentworth in Jane Austen\u2019s Persuasion<\/em>. We\u2019re told Wentworth came back from sea in 1817 with a cool \u00a32.2 million quid in today\u2019s money. He is supposed to have made this in a few short years in what is vaguely described as \u2018prize money\u2019. But come on. Even if he made all that by chasing bad guys \u2013 like pirates and illegal slave traders \u2013 how did the majority of men his age on those there high seas come into that kind of cash?<\/p>\n Best not to ask, like the rest of the characters in the book. But Wentworth is probably still a fair representation of the dreamboat of his day. Rich, witty and gallant. Glad to have done his duty. In his backstory he\u2019s not allowed to marry the heroine of the tale when he\u2019s young because he doesn\u2019t have the dosh. But then when he makes his fortune at sea he comes back to claim his female booty. The big climax of the drama in the novel isn\u2019t the dirty stuff of early Empire, it\u2019s our heroine giddily falling off a wall to bang her head and be rescued by our devoted hero.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a really enjoyable read even if it sidesteps the great drama of the day in terms of context. It\u2019s a genuine insight into how the people who ran the early Empire experienced each other, how they saw themselves. They were obviously nice people. Who needs context really, eh?<\/p>\n Empire officers carrying out the actual torture and slaughter on the ground, were very often religious. One such man claimed he saw \u2018the finger of God in this\u2019, meaning the mass slaughter and mistreatment of Indians in the 1870s.27\u00a0<\/sup>Good old Colonel James Neill \u2013 who took his troops raping and killing, and whose men killed everyone in Futtehpore (and raped the women) \u2013 wrote: \u2018God grant I may have acted with Justice. I know I have with severity, but under the circumstances I trust for forgiveness.\u201928<\/sup><\/p>\n I think he meant the forgiveness of God not his Indian victims. Happily Colonel Neill was shot dead before the end of the rebellion at Lucknow. The loyal officer was, however, awarded a posthumous knighthood by Queen Victoria.29<\/sup> We don\u2019t know what happened at the pearly gates of heaven.<\/p>\n Queen Victoria herself was kept informed of the degree and nature of the slaughter in India by one of her more sensitive officers who was disturbed by the horrors he had personally witnessed. The officer became a laughing stock.30<\/sup> Queen Victoria did nothing to stop the rampage, only \u2013 as we\u2019ve seen \u2013 ordering her troops to take over control of India from the mercenaries of the East India Company once the Great Rebellion had been put down.31<\/sup> After this, as we\u2019ve seen, the murder continued for a decade.32<\/sup> When the dust finally settled, British Prime Minister Gladstone had his bejewelled queen declared \u2018Empress of India\u2019.<\/p>\n So how does a dramatist realistically depict a character who apparently genuinely believes they are acting for God, but also orders the mass rape and killing of thousands, or even tens of thousands of civilians? Simple. We say what they did and what they said, but for God\u2019s sake put it in context. Give the facts. But there\u2019s the rub. Facts don\u2019t fit well into drama. They just don\u2019t. If you even actually know them. Hence this essay.<\/p>\n And what of Dickens\u2019 character? The good bloke of Victorian literature. Of course, he was duped by a clever propaganda trick, but wasn\u2019t the plight of Victorian street kids also grossly misrepresented in the press? Not to mention the whole of the rest of the poor in Victorian England? Dickens apparently saw through all that, writing about them and their predicaments. Maybe he was just \u2018old-fashioned\u2019 when it came to race? Or was India too far away for him to realise?<\/p>\n The English revolutionary Ernest Jones wasn\u2019t old-fashioned about the humanity of the Indian race. He knew exactly what was going on all those thousands of miles away, and he stood by and spoke up for the Indian rebels at every opportunity.33<\/sup> As did Marx and Engels. Stupid Charles. Great writer, though.<\/p>\n And what of the character of the English working class at the time of Empire? During the early Industrial Revolution, the newly formed and horribly exploited British working class were staunch supporters of the Abolition Movement and an inspiration to risen slaves throughout the Caribbean.34<\/sup><\/p>\n The early 1800s saw a powerful working-class movement emerge in the face of the Peterloo massacre to become the revolutionary Chartist Movement of the 1840s \u2013 centred on the demand \u2018One Man One Vote\u2019.35\u00a0<\/sup>At the time of the Chartists\u2019 campaign, their demand was a revolutionary one because the working class were the vast majority and, at the time, real power did actually reside in the British Parliament. A fact that would change as soon as the vote was expanded.36<\/sup> As Karl Marx recognised, one vote per worker would at that moment have made an instant ruling class out of the working class. And if once they had seized power, male workers included women in the vote, as surely they would, it would have massively strengthened their majority.<\/p>\n The capitalists were having none of it, of course, and gave the English working class a taste of colonial-style violence, with hangings of political leaders and massacres of unarmed protestors. Limited in scale compared to the violence in India, China and the rest, the violence was nonetheless ferocious when it came, with for example twenty-two shot dead in Newport, Wales, in December 183937<\/sup>. Much of the violence was blamed on the Chartists themselves, as is often the case when the shit hits the fan.38<\/sup> But the violence worked, by terrifying more respectable elements of the Chartist Movement, and threatening the unity.<\/p>\n When in 1848 a petition was finally delivered to Parliament demanding one man one vote, signed by one-and-a-half million, it was rejected out of hand. The resulting disturbances were used as an excuse to launch an all-out assault on the Chartists, which caused the respectable elements to finally abandon it. By 1858, the Chartist movement had shrivelled to a handful of hopefuls.<\/p>\n But even in the 1860s, during the US Civil War, the bulk of the working class in Manchester still underwent incredible hardships rather than work the cotton imported from the Southern slave states in the famous \u2018cotton strikes\u2019.39<\/sup> Though by the time of the Fenian uprising in Ireland only two years later, the English working class seemed to have lost something of their stomach for international solidarity and failed to prevent the execution of five Irishmen in Manchester, who were accused of killing a prison guard when trying to rescue Fenian leaders from custody. Instead, ten thousand people turned up to watch them hang.40<\/sup><\/p>\n After the defeat of the Chartists, the more skilled industrial workers in England began to act in their own interests and organised themselves into the first legal trade unions. These unions were designed to keep other workers out of the best-paid work and drive up the wages of their own members. This was the origin of the trade union movement in Britain.41<\/sup><\/p>\n With honourable exceptions, by the start of World War I in 1914, the majority of the better off European and US workers in the industrial heartlands had largely turned their back on revolutionary internationalism, and had settled down to try and get the best deal for themselves out of a capitalist system that was a vampiric beast sucking the blood from whole of the rest of the world.42<\/sup><\/p>\n The End of Empire<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Luckily for the world, after World War II, the British realised how, during the Empire, there\u2019d been instances of bad behaviour and racism, some of it shocking. So, despite their better judgement \u2013 and, yes, sometimes reluctantly \u2013 the British granted independence to the former Empire and went it alone.<\/p>\n More often than not, the newly independent countries of the former Empire made a mess of governing themselves. But the British \u2013 with help from their good friends, the Americans \u2013 kept forces stationed all over the world for just such an eventuality. If things got too far out of hand, the British could \u2013 and still do \u2013 intervene to save their former subjects from themselves and from each other \u2013 and especially from other dark forces such as Chinese Dictators, Bloodthirsty Russians, or Assorted Religious Fanatics who oppress women and LGBTQ+ people.<\/p>\n This mission to save the world from itself is a great responsibility that can involve the British in tricky moral and political dilemmas. But we\u2019re determined to see decency and democracy maintained the world over. We\u2019re good like that. It\u2019s who we are and who we\u2019ve always been underneath it all. Some version or other of this myth is propagated 24\/7 in the West \u2013 with big results. Huge swathes of Westerners believe it, or something like it, with adjustments for political creed. Even some socialists. In other words, most Westerners believe that the end of the colonial period meant the end of imperialism. Imperialism being the political and\/or economic domination of smaller or weaker countries by powerful ones for the benefit of the powerful ones.<\/p>\n What really happened?<\/p>\n Concerning Violence II<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n The end of the Empire was a bloodbath. After World War Two, hundreds of millions of people in the colonies across Africa and Asia rose up to free themselves from European rule. The rebellions were inspired in part by Western anti-fascist slogans, partly by the Soviet Red Army\u2019s stunning victories against Nazism in Europe, but mostly by their own brutal oppression at the hands of Europeans.<\/p>\n The scale and ferocity of the West\u2019s murderous response to this worldwide rebellion \u2013 a response led by Britain, France and the US \u2013 was as horrific as in the days of Empire. Take Kenya. In the early 1900s, the Kikuyu people, numbering two-or-so million souls had the misfortune to live on the best land in Kenya when white settlers came to claim the land on behalf of the British Empire. Many of the later settlers had fought in World War I. The newly arrived whites were terrible farmers and bad workers, and had it not been for the Empire sustaining them with grants and preferable terms of trade they would have failed.43<\/sup><\/p>\n Gradually, though, with great brutality and ruthless legal trickery, the white settlers rid the best land of the Kikuyu people and, with the help of the boundless cheap labour of the ruined Kikuyu, eventually established vastly profitable plantations growing mainly, but not only, coffee.44\u00a0<\/sup>The majority of the Kikuyu were driven into reservations on the poorest land which couldn\u2019t possibly sustain their numbers. Here they starved and fought among themselves, or fell ill. The rest found refuge in the slums of the sweltering and disease-ridden capital city, Nairobi. The lucky ones established desperately poor farms on inadequate plots of land near the white settlers, where they were bullied and used as cheap labour on the adjoining plantations, living in constant fear of eviction or being swindled out of their possession.45<\/sup><\/p>\n Over fifty years or so, the Kikuyu people went from being among the most blessed tribal people of the world to the most wretched. Those few Kikuyu who managed to get an education pleaded the case of their desperate people again and again to the various branches of the colonial government \u2013 and even to the British in Britain. They met with indifference and contempt at every turn, sometimes imprisonment.46<\/sup><\/p>\n By 1952, the Kikuyu people formed the Kenya Land and Freedom Army and launched an uprising against colonial rule. The colonial government\u2019s response, backed by the British army, is among the most brutal and shameful episodes of human history. When it was over, the British government destroyed most of the papers documenting their behaviour,47<\/sup> but research by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian Caroline Elkins has recently uncovered the truth. If anyone had spoken to the Kikuyu survivors before this they could have easily discovered the truth a lot earlier. But this is how history is done.<\/p>\n To break the staunch solidarity of the Kikuyu people, British Crown forces established a vast system of concentration camps, at first for men, but when the British discovered the backbone of Kikuyu solidarity was the women, for tens of thousands of women also.48\u00a0<\/sup>Supporters of the rebel Land and Freedom Army took an oath of allegiance to the cause based on the traditional tribal system. Almost all the Kikuyu people took it.49<\/sup> The oath was sacrosanct and a matter of great seriousness. To break the oath was to abandon yourself and your people.<\/p>\n The aim of the colonial violence was twofold. Destroy the Land and Freedom Army, and break Kikuyu civilian solidarity. Through systematic torture, civilians would be made to individually \u2018confess\u2019 their oath and declare allegiance to the colonial authorities. Those who did confess could become \u2018loyalists\u2019 and be granted small privileges. Those who did not were to be destroyed spiritually, culturally and physically.50<\/sup><\/p>\n As the war intensified, so the main privilege on offer to loyalists could only really be to escape being beaten, or worked and tortured to death in the concentration camps. And to become a loyalist, prisoners would have to prove themselves by beating former comrades to death, or inflicting terrible torture on them, or by becoming camp guards. Converted loyalists were often the most brutal. The right to inflict such suffering on powerless inmates in turn became one of the few privileges of confession. And, of course, once women were introduced into the system, rape and sexual torture became loyalist privileges too.<\/p>\n The violence against prisoners was carried out by settlers, British district officers, the Kenyan police force, African loyalists, and members of the British Army. Bottles (often broken), gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin and hot eggs were thrust up men\u2019s rectums and women\u2019s vaginas. Women\u2019s breasts were squeezed with pliers. Male prisoners were castrated and made to eat their own testicles. Prisoners would be beaten to death in front of other prisoners. Prisoners were butchered to death slowly with knives. Prisoners were publicly strung up and had sand stuffed into their anuses, often until their guts ruptured and they died. Prisoners were dragged to death behind Land Rovers, had their fingers cut off, were made to watch executions and then told to dig their own graves. Prisoners were burnt alive.51<\/sup> Many white settlers frankly and sincerely expressed the view that the only \u2018solution\u2019 was the extermination of the entire Kikuyu race.52<\/sup><\/p>\n Tens of thousands of prisoners were purposefully worked to death in the sweltering heat with water and food restricted. Anyone slacking could be beaten to death on the spot. Their comrades were made to bury them. Groups of those who refused to confess were taken out, made to dig their own graves and shot en masse<\/em>.53\u00a0<\/sup>Women prisoners were subjected to endless sexual torture. One women survivor reported being taken with large a group of other \u2018hardcore\u2019 women \u2013 as those who refused to confess were called \u2013 to be shot. After the group had been made to dig their own mass grave, the survivor was selected by an officer to be spared. She was instead kept as a sex slave.54<\/sup><\/p>\n The British governor of the whole colony of Kenya \u2013 one Evelyn Baring \u2013 of Barings Bank fame \u2013 would, on receiving complaints of sexual violence, come to inspect the women\u2019s camps. He is reported to have stood and stared at the women as they squatted before him, caked in filth, while the good governor again and again found nothing untoward.55<\/sup><\/p>\n The majority of the Kikuyu population passed through this system at some point during the rebellion. The entire Kikuyu population of Nairobi was rounded up in one day and poured into the camps. Most who escaped the official concentration camps \u2013 mainly women, children and the elderly \u2013 met a terrible fate themselves in the parallel \u2018protected village\u2019 system that was designed also to receive people released from the concentration camps.56<\/sup><\/p>\n To cut the Land and Freedom Army off from their Kikuyu supporters, the British forced a huge proportion of the Kikuyu people out of their existing homes and villages into these villages.57<\/sup> The system was a model developed by the British during their war against the Malayan people, which was (and still is) considered a model of counter-revolutionary success by the British military establishment.58<\/sup><\/p>\n In Kenya, the protected village campaign was carried out in a hurricane of violence. The traditional villages were burned and the women, children and elderly were driven into new homes. Many were killed on the spot to terrify the rest into submission.59\u00a0<\/sup>When they arrived at the protected villages, the destitute Kikuyu people found nothing but a cordon of soldiers and armed loyalists. There was no shelter, water, sanitation facilities or medical supplies. Food was a thin gruel. Then there was a regime of brutal forced labour as the villagers built their own village, chased by loyalists with clubs and whips. There were rapes and random killings of villagers, including children. Thousands died of disease and exhaustion.60<\/sup><\/p>\n The loyalists lived nearby in comparative luxury, in huts built by the forced labourers. Loyalist wives did no forced labour.61\u00a0<\/sup>It is estimated that three hundred thousand Kikuyu people out of a population of one-and-a-half million died under these savage conditions of murder and forced labour.62<\/sup> Equivalent in Britain to approximately seven-and-a-half million dead.<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth saying clearly, out loud. Forced labour is slavery. This is 1954-6, in Kenya, overseen by British Crown forces with Queen Elizabeth II of England at their head. A queen whose image, by the way, was everywhere in the camps and protected villages, whose anthem was sung loudly during murders and tortures, especially by groups of white settlers.63<\/sup> The aim of much of the forced labour was to work people to death as a form of political terror.<\/p>\n Eventually, isolated from the majority of their people, the Kikuyu people\u2019s Land and Freedom Army, though fearsome, brave and well organised, was certain to be defeated. The white terror worked. The mass of the Kikuyu people had \u2018confessed\u2019 or been driven from their land and homes, murdered, or worked to death. Only the tiniest \u2018hard core\u2019 remained who refused to break.64<\/sup><\/p>\n The military task complete, the British officially withdrew from Kenya, leaving behind an vulnerable and corrupt political structure built entirely out of the loyalist community and those prepared to work with them.65\u00a0<\/sup>By now, the loyalists were up to their necks in a sea of blood. Tens of thousands were guilty of crimes against humanity for which they could be held accountable if they weren\u2019t very careful. They were living in stolen property, on stolen land, on borrowed time. They were vulnerable to their own people who would hate them forever, and they were vicious as hell.<\/p>\n The son of the first president of independent Kenya, Peter Muigai Kenyatta, with the full knowledge of his father, took part in the notorious interrogation regime, during the terror.66<\/sup> Another of his sons, Uhuru Kenyatta, was president from 2013 to 2022. In the years after World War II, each colonial rebellion was different, but what happened in Kenya was typical.In most cases, ruthless violence was used by the former colonial powers to weaken or destroy revolutionary movements and sculpt Western-friendly gangster regimes. Only then was power handed over. These newly formed elites were totally dependent on the West for political support, arms and, most of all, a market for their crops and minerals.67<\/sup>Welcome to the End of Empire.<\/p>\n Concerning Economics II<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Before he died, Fidel Castrol urged progressives and revolutionaries the world over to study economics. This is a big ask because \u2013 in all seriousness \u2013 Western economists themselves don\u2019t seem to understand economics. So when the 2008 banking crisis hit, students at Manchester University asked their lecturers to explain it \u2013 and famously they couldn\u2019t.68<\/sup><\/p>\n Modern economics is complicated by design and often shrouded in secrecy. The most expensively educated people in the world are engaged in making it so. University economics curriculums have given up teaching economic history and Marxist theories, instead focussing on statistical analysis of market mechanisms, and training students for roles at investment banks or for life in the boardrooms of multinational corporations.69\u00a0<\/sup>Meanwhile, in the real world, economists and lawyers employed by multinational corporations, backed by Western governments, have created a wicked web of complicated economic mechanisms by which West continues to enrich itself at the expense of the former colonies.<\/p>\n Example. Prepare for a brain bleed, but bear with me cos this shit is important and complexity is part of the method. Take Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) courts. I can hear you yawning already. But these mothers are mean<\/em>! You can admire them like you might the claws of a lion or the talons of an eagle. ISDS courts are nasty legal entities designed to stop countries like Kenya acting in their own interests instead of in the interests of the corporations of the former mother country. Even in a thoroughly corrupted country like Kenya, this could sometimes happen as a regime tries to win votes, or a dictator tries to justify their position. Or make a quick buck.<\/p>\n These courts are essentially kangaroo courts set up inside the World Bank.70<\/sup> They were set up in the 1960s as the liberation movements in the colonies reached their climax, in order to protect Western corporate interests in the affected countries.71\u00a0<\/sup>Cases are heard in Washington or The Hague. Many of the judges (called arbitrators) are former members of US government administrations, or other such characters.72<\/sup><\/p>\n To get help from the World Bank, governments must sign up to the jurisdiction of these courts \u2013 though calling them courts is generous, implying a degree of fairness or a potential for justice that just isn\u2019t there. The judgements of these bodies are legally binding. If a country refuses to accept a judgement, its assets, including shipping, goods, money, bonds or gold held in US or European banks can be seized.73<\/sup><\/p>\n In these courts the world\u2019s largest corporations, employing the world\u2019s most expensively trained lawyers, can sue the world\u2019s smallest and most vulnerable countries for billions of dollars for threatening their profitability, or for interfering in their business activities. Such a threat to business can be, for instance \u2013 and this is a common one \u2013 a small country demanding environmental protections before issuing a drilling licence.<\/p>\n At the time of writing, Honduras is being sued for $11 billion by an international corporation for not allowing the establishment of a special economic zone on its territory. Special economic zones have their own security forces, their own tax laws, and are exempt from national employment laws. In other words, they are mini-colonies. The total gross national income for the whole of Honduras is approximately $29 billion. So the corporation is suing Honduras for more than a third of its entire annual income.74<\/sup><\/p>\n Conversely, the world\u2019s largest corporations can have the rulings of the supreme courts of small countries overturned in these courts. So, for example, Ecuador\u2019s highest court ordered Texaco (now taken over by Chevron) to pay $9 billion in compensation, after it was revealed the company had pumped billions of litres of carcinogenic toxins into the environment. Indigenous Ecuadorians reported Texaco\u2019s oil workers dynamiting their homes and subjecting them to sexual and other violence.75\u00a0<\/sup>The ruling by Ecuador\u2019s highest court demanding compensation from Texaco\/Chevron was overturned by the World Bank\u2019s court.76<\/sup><\/p>\n There are many other such secretive, invisible and nasty legal instruments out there, such as Bilateral Trade Agreements (BTAs). Again with BTAs, the complexity \u2013 hidden in the small print \u2013 plays an important role. So people signing BTAs in the small nations are often unaware of the real implications, which are only revealed later, when the small countries are suddenly hit by vast lawsuits overseen by the ISDS courts.When he was released from jail, Nelson Mandela toured the world and was asked to sign a blizzard of BTAs by Western businessmen and diplomats to signal his return to the international fold. Mandela signed and as a result South Africa is now tied up in endless nasty legal cases. The nation\u2019s hands are cuffed in new chains when it comes to crafting its own economic future.77<\/sup><\/p>\n In other words, highly secretive and specialist kangaroo courts whose deciding vote is held by a Westerner have more power than the highest courts in the countries of the former colonies.78\u00a0<\/sup>There are thousands of such lawsuits now underway the world over. And there has been an exponential growth in such cases since the end of the USSR, since which time smaller countries have had nowhere else to turn for their trade.79\u00a0<\/sup>You get the idea – despite the supposed End of Empire, the West employs a million economic mechanisms to exploit the rest of the world for the benefit of its own populations who, relative to the rest of the world, are sitting pretty.<\/p>\n The main weapon is, of course, the boundless and infinitely exploitable pool of cheap labour, the exploitation of which has, since the end of Empire, been massively expanded and intensified, especially since jobs from the West are being exported there.80\u00a0<\/sup>Check the label on your shirt or trousers (not the washing instructions).<\/p>\n In his seminal work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa81<\/sup><\/em>, the African revolutionary writer and activist Walter Rodney suggests that if we compare a map of Europe to a map of Africa, even a quick glance reveals a deep truth about modern imperial exploitation. In Europe, the roads are thick lines connecting the major cities to one another. In the former colonies, all roads lead to the sea.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve already seen how the industrial systems of the West emerged (dripping blood from every pore) from the exploitation of slaves and the colonial people of the world. I\u2019m arguing here that the imperial system continues to this day, though disguised \u2013 and that, without it, the West would have to change utterly, from head to toe.82<\/sup><\/p>\n Here are three final facts before we return to the question of portraying Western characters in drama:<\/p>\n So the question for a Western dramatist trying to write realistic characters is: What do Westerners do and say in this context?<\/p>\n Concerning Character II<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n So what of the main characters in this great drama of the vampire North secretly sucking the lifeblood of the global South like a bloated mediaeval aristocrat? Certainly governments and big business have always had secrets, but for the main driving force of world politics and economics \u2013 imperialism \u2013 to be something the world has to pretend doesn\u2019t exist takes us to a whole new level of deception. How does a dramatist create realistic characters in this <\/em>context?<\/p>\n The easiest characters to portray are those of the white Kenyan settlers and other racists in the colonial world as the visible Empire comes to an end. These racists invariably describe the Kikuyu as \u2018savage\u2019, \u2018barbaric\u2019, \u2018primitive\u2019, \u2018brutal\u2019, and \u2018inhuman\u2019, then behave in the most savage, barbaric, primitive, brutal and inhuman ways towards the Kikuyu. Talk about victim-blaming.<\/p>\n In my opening dramatic vignettes, the white settlers are our first lovers kissing when we \u2018pull back to real\u2019 people being hanged nearby. Their actions are easy to judge and to depict. But once the corrupt post-independence regime takes over, white-settler racism has to lower its voice in public and the context changes.<\/p>\n So now in the dramatic vignettes, our lovers are kissing on one street while people are being hanged on the next \u2013 or in the next town \u2013 or, most likely, in the poorest districts where our lovers have never ventured \u2013 by people our lovers can plausibly say are nothing to do with them. How much do they really believe their own story? We don\u2019t know. But already it\u2019s harder to show them as they really are. It\u2019s easier for our lovers \u2013 and our audience \u2013 to kid themselves, or only to be interested in love.<\/p>\n What about the modern British Army in all this? Is there a change of character from the Victorian soldiers in India with their open and honest rape and slaughter of Indian civilians? Their god-fearing and gentlemanly habits? What do military Brits and other Westerners say and do today? After World War II, with the defeat first of the French army in Vietnam at the hands of a popular people\u2019s army, then the defeat of the US army \u2013 the greatest military force in human history \u2013 by the same poorly armed but determined force, new methods of Western warfare became imperative. As we\u2019ve seen, if the Western powers were to maintain their economic dominance they could no longer show their faces directly in the colonies for fear of giving the population an obvious target to mobilise against. They would have to start lying big time.<\/p>\n The new form of secret warfare became known as \u2018the dirty war\u201986<\/sup>. So now Western powers would do as little as possible of the hands-on stuff themselves. Instead they would train and secretly arm official and semi-official forces \u2013 or very\u00a0un<\/em>official forces to do their dirty work for them. Such as Mujahidin in Afghanistan (later to become Al-Qaeda) or the brutal drug gangs in Latin American that brought the crack epidemic to the US in the 1980s, and have since brought such chaos to Latin America as a whole.87<\/sup><\/p>\n A member of one such unofficial military force \u2013 used by the British to overthrow the government of Libya in 2011 \u2013 blew up the Manchester Arena in May 2017, killing twenty-two people and injuring 1,017.88<\/sup><\/p>\n During the 1970s and 1980s, the US military had a notorious facility in Fort Benning, Georgia, known as \u2018The School of the Americas\u2019 (since renamed Fort Moore, but still going strong),89<\/sup> where many of the most violent of the Latin American military dictatorships were trained in the art of crushing progressive political movements.90<\/sup> The torturers and death squads of El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, Haiti, Uruguay, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Honduras, Guatemala and the rest received instruction here and went on a decades-long rampage of kidnapping and killing of Indigenous peoples. Hundreds of thousands of trade unionists, feminists, socialists, communists and Indigenous activists lost their lives in horrific circumstances. Methods included drugging victims and pushing them out of military aircraft over the Pacific Ocean.91<\/sup><\/p>\n The US government, meanwhile, kept its own hands clean and was able to portray itself to the world as the respectable peacemaker, a paragon of liberal democracy. In other words, the President of the USA could go round looking like Queen Victoria – and I don\u2019t mean the black silk dress.<\/p>\n In Britain we train many of the most notorious post-colonial (Commonwealth) militaries at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, where top honours are sponsored by the states of Kuwait, Qatar and King Hussein of Jordan. So our contemporary military now say one thing and do entirely another. They too have become slippery and very hard to portray in proper context. But, of course, that\u2019s the whole point: disguise or \u2018plausible deniability\u2019, as it\u2019s known officially. No doubt our military leaders believe they are doing this for the highest reasons \u2013 but nonetheless, they are big fat liars.<\/p>\n Britain\u2019s most renown contemporary military strategist \u2013 General Frank Kitson \u2013 cut his teeth during the genocide in Kenya where he personally began to forge new methods of warfare, including what he calls \u2018psychological operations\u201992<\/sup>. Which might include, for example, soldiers \u2018blacking up\u2019 and committing outrages that could be blamed on Kikuyu rebels93<\/sup>.<\/p>\n The British government has now effectively admitted that this general went on to run loyalist death squads during the dirty war in the north of Ireland in the early 1970s. These death squads targeted a range of people in the Catholic community, often civilians.94<\/sup> Throughout the whole period of war in Ireland, British Crown forces maintained they were only there as peacekeepers95<\/sup>\u2013 i.e., keeping warring Catholics and Protestants apart.96<\/sup><\/p>\n The whole British strategy during the war in Ireland was effectively a psychological operation. Otherwise known as a lie. On 16 March 1988, a loyalist terrorist launched a gun and grenade attack on Catholic mourners \u2013 including children \u2013 at a funeral in Belfast. This was the funeral of three Irish Republican volunteers who had been executed by British soldiers in Gibraltar after they had already surrendered.97<\/sup> The funeral was surrounded by a huge British army security cordon, supposedly to keep the mourners safe. Yet the loyalist terrorist perpetrator somehow got through the security cordon to launch his attack, killing three people, wounding sixty.98<\/sup><\/p>\n So, in our vignettes, our kissing lovers might be British soldiers (uniforms can be sexy, yes?) forming part of a security cordon at this very funeral. They haven\u2019t got a clue that their superior officers have concocted a plan to let a loyalist terrorist attack the mourners, but even if they did, our lovers might not care because they will have comrades who have been shot by guerrillas defending the Catholic community that our lovers are fighting, even though they\u2019re pretending otherwise.<\/p>\n It\u2019s complicated, but still possible to portray \u2013 just. To round off our soldiers in Ireland kissing story: it turns out they should have been more careful to hide their kiss, because when there\u2019s a political scandal about the leaky security cordon they are court-martialled for kissing when they should have been doing their jobs properly and not accidentally letting a loyalist terrorist bomb a Catholic funeral. This last bit is entirely fictional. There was no real political scandal. You get the idea.<\/p>\n So what about the rest of us? Here it starts to become difficult for a dramatist. How does a writer realistically portray what we ordinary, everyday Westerners do and say in this messed-up context? Say, someone on the average wage in an average town. Which as we\u2019ve seen, puts them unknowingly in the top 4% of earners worldwide, even though they might feel skint and miserably insecure. In world terms, our kissing lovers \u2013 wherever in the West they find themselves \u2013 are now the most luxurious aristocrats who are nowhere near any hangings or skulduggery at Irish republican funerals!<\/p>\n Our lovers might be average, universally accepted as \u2018normal\u2019, and not require qualification in the West, but in world terms are they not outlandishly strange characters, even grotesque? Any love story set in Nazi Germany during the build-up to World War II \u2013 before the fighting breaks out and the concentration camps really get going \u2013 automatically becomes a love story with politics and history somewhere near the very heart of it. It\u2019s impossible or bizarre to portray lovers in these circumstances without the context. The context automatically becomes the theme.<\/p>\n A love story set in USA, UK or France during the appalling and far more widespread campaigns of worldwide political murder conducted in the soon-to-be-former colonies by these nations can easily be just a simple love story with no wider context at all. It\u2019s almost impossible to portray these modern western lovers in proper context without the craziest narrative gymnastics.What even is realism in these circumstances? Is realism possible in a surreal world?<\/p>\n In Dickens\u2019 day, the mass of the downtrodden were in the next street. Dickens probably had to step over them to get to the shops. The cities were full of the kind of poverty we only really see today in the global south. There were public hangings most weeks down Dickens\u2019 way. And he couldn\u2019t help being aware of at least some <\/em>of the real context even if he disconnected it from the excesses of the Empire in India. Today our most expensively educated and highly paid journalists most often seem honestly unaware of the proper context of their own lives.<\/p>\n Most ordinary Westerners feel <\/em>for the wretched of the Earth, but few grasp the reality. This can be dangerous, perhaps even fatal for our collective fate. Take the epic Miners\u2019 Strike of 1984\/5, when two hundred thousand British coal miners, their entire communities and their political allies suddenly had to face the might of the British state head on. Thatcher\u2019s government launched a carefully planned attack against the National Union of Mineworkers, in order to break the back of the trade union movement as a whole. But by the time the attack came, the British working-class movement had for decades been insulated from the struggles of the poor in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Malaya, Sri Lanka, Yemen, Ireland and the rest of the former Empire, as the masses there fought heroically \u2013 and died in their millions.<\/p>\n The British working class as a whole had not learned the bitter lessons of those struggles and \u2013 with honourable exceptions \u2013 had done little to intervene in any significant way. So by 1984 \u2013 despite the heroism of the mining communities that fought to the bitter end \u2013 in world terms, the miners and their allies were relatively easy pickings for the battle-hardened British state. Engels warned us of this as far back as 1874 with these words. \u2018A people which oppresses another cannot emancipate itself.\u201999<\/sup><\/p>\n So what now? Everyone with a heart knows bitter new struggles are coming. It\u2019s in the air. You can feel it. But because of the nature of the beast, if the capitalists endure, our planet will almost certainly die. Or, even before we get there, we could find ourselves in the midst of a nuclear war centred on Europe.<\/p>\n In this context, I have questions. In the coming fight, if we Westerners demand from the British, American, or European governments only higher wages, or better health and social services, or a green, sustainable economy, without considering these demands in the post-colonial context \u2013 are we in fact only demanding a fairer, more sustainable imperialism?<\/p>\n If so, is this to be paid for by the continued misery and degradation of billions of our brothers and sisters in the global south? And if so, what sort of characters are we? And doesn\u2019t history show this can only lead to defeat? Can\u2019t we instead try to understand our actions in their proper context and look for a new way forward that doesn\u2019t ignore everything that has gone before? Can\u2019t we find a way to fight alongside those who have nothing to lose, as more and more of us lose everything?<\/p>\n I hope so. But I can\u2019t say for sure that we will. I do know I have to try and write about it, though. Realistically and in context.<\/p>\n Endnotes<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\n
![\"Captain](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/Captain_Charles_John_Stanley_Gough_winning_the_VC_at_Khurkowhah_Indian_Mutiny.jpg\")
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