Events from the past week
have raised the question of whether or not third world people should sever the
ties of dependency with their former colonial masters once and for all.
The first group of these
issues revolved around the Commonwealth Heads of Government Summit in Kampala. I was vicariously embarrassed by the entire
spectacle, Ugandans swarming the darkened streets in the millions to welcome the British
Queen and to underline their country's subservience to her throne. It was all a little much.
But that was just the tapered end of my shame; it panned
out to the ignominy of the Ugandan president requesting British assistance in
solving the Ugandan land distribution problem. The system of individual
ownership of land was introduced into Uganda
by the British colonial administration. In the central Buganda
kingdom, the British allocated chunks of land to a few well-placed individuals,
while the rest of the people were rendered tenants under what became the mailo-land system. The disruption
caused to the traditional system was profound and mailo-land remains a sticky
issue, creating wrangles between landlords and tenants who often cannot meet
payments and who are held back from progress by their inability to raise bank credit
on the land they have lived on for hundreds of years.
In a meeting with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown Ugandan
President Yoweri Museveni asked that the UK,
Uganda's colonial
ruler, create a fund for the compensation of landlords in Uganda and the transfer of the land to the poorer orders of scoety. This fund ,he said, would economically empower Uganda's
millions. Museveni, is said to have told the British Premier that under the
mailo-land system, the original owners of the land became serfs, living in indentured misery and forcing the government to step in to deal with the widespread poverty and unrest.
The conversation then advanced to the payment of gratuities
and pensions for Ugandans who fought alongside British forces in the King's African
Rifles during World War II, a matter that the British Prime Minister promised
to raise in the British Parliament. He pointed out that Britain
had committed itself to give Uganda
£70m annually for ten years; part of which he suggested should be used to set
up the land fund and pay the pension of the World War veterans.
As such conversations go, the British Prime Minister then
asked Museveni to lean on the Zimbabwean government of Robert Mugabe, whose
travails, quite ironically begun when the British pulled out of an arrangement
not dissimilar to the one Museveni is requesting.
Far
to the east of Uganda,
Malaysian Indians (one of whose number is global steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal)
took the British government to court demanding compensation for the suffering
and discrimination they have met at the hands of the Malaysian system. P Wathya
Moorthy, a lawyer who is also the Hindu Action Rights Force chair filed the
suit against the UK secretary of state for Foreign and Commonwealth affairs
last Thursday at the Royal Courts of Justice in London.
In his suit he seeks the UK's acknowledgement of its role in the creation of
the plight of Indian Malaysians, and their claim for compensation based on the ‘pain,
suffering, humiliation, discrimination and continuous colonialisation' they
have suffered as transplants into Malaysia. The UK's responsibility the suit
makes out is based on its role in the exportation of labour from India to
Malaysia, and for its part in the creation and validation of a Malaysian
Constitution that did not then safeguard the rights of those it had brought
into this inconvenience. The suit asks that each one of Malaysia's
2 million ethnic-Indians be granted £1 million and for international
acknowledgement that Article 153 of the Federal Constitution, which provides
for special privileges for indigenous Malay, is in contravention of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Labour Organisation
legislation with regard to racial discrimination.
It
seems to me peculiar that so many years after the end of colonisation, people
from the former colonies should be looking to the colonial masters for
assistance in this most servile way. It is shocking that it has not yet dawned
on many of us that the reasons for colonisation extend down to this day, and
that the exploitation of the third world continues unabated even as the chains
of oppression become less visible. Indigenous solutions to indigenous problems are
the only way out of third world problems, and when the wealthy west is
confronted, experience seems to me to demand that such interaction is not done
from a position of servility and genuflection.
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Yet servility (usually alternating with reverse racism) is a common illness not just in Africa. First lick a foreign shoe, then eat and munch far over one's appetite, then vomit all over the samesaid shoe.
There are issues for which colonizing powers may well be held responsible, and indeed not infrequently they are aware of such legacies and responsibilities. The German Federal Republic began in the early 1950s to pay pensions to its Askari veterans in Tansania (former German East Africa); this was not only a matter of financial aid, but also of respect and appreciation for people who valiantly risked and often gave their lives.
I wonder whether the (sc. black) Kenyan WW II veterans (since the very last WW I ones from KAR and Kariakor must be 105 years or older) receive any pensions from the Crown?
Alexander