The death of Queen Elizabeth and half-full glass of colonialism

The death of Queen Elizabeth II has elicited wide-ranging reactions worldwide. There was understandable outpouring of grief in the UK and its overseas realms for the loss of a towering and reassuring sovereign.

In some other places, there was oblivious indifference, apparently borne of dwindling familiarity with the British monarchy, which some increasingly consider an archaic and distant institution.

Predictably too, and as happens whenever occasion allows, there was a sharp spike in nationalism in some former colonies, and much venting about colonialism, brutal occupation and the slave trade.

Thanks to the longevity of her reign, Elizabeth was the embodiment of 'queen' essence to most people alive today. I vividly remember my late mother singing to us renditions from her childhood, which she and her pre-independence generation in Nyeri were compelled to sing in praise of Elizabeth and her little prince and princess.

Way into the 21st century, as in most parts of the world, this very queen has continued to shape the impressions of our own little children, looking at them from the 'Q' section of their ABC phonics charts, with her stoic and unperturbed demeanor that somehow evoked a Mona Lisa with a crown.

Spanning disparate generations with undiminishing constancy as she did is no mean feat. Let's say that for Diana the People's Princess, there was, in Elizabeth, a matching Peoples' Queen.

Much more importantly, Queen Elizabeth was the undisputable bedrock and glue which held her nation Britain together as it weathered Brexit, overseas wars and several serious internal storms, albeit as a disinterested arbiter. Indeed, laying aside the touchy matter of historical injustices for a minute, one easily admires this doubtlessly greatest of all monarchs.

Yet the bitter, contrarian voices of which those of South African firebrand politician Julius Malema and his Economic Freedom Fighters party have been loudest, are not without merit. For between 1952 and 1960 during the height of the Mau Mau uprising which happened during Elizabeth's watch, Britain- an avaricious leader in the scramble for Africa- visited untold systematic brutality on native Kenyans in a dark episode well-elucidated by Caroline Elkins in her book 'British Gulag'.

Incredibly, neither the good queen- who ironically ascended to the throne while on a visit here- nor her aristocratic henchmen saw any evil in their unilateral and hegemonic takeover of other people's lands.

To them, all carnages and disenfranchisements meted upon the 'blanket natives' were mere collateral in the course of the latter's necessary cultural and religious reeducation. And of course, all effort was made to justify the colonial project by the British empire to marginalise and place its black and brown subjects in a lower category of condemned races.

Today, many agree that Britain has so far not shown compelling remorse for its rampant past atrocities.

All that notwithstanding, my well-considered opinion is that the familiar tendency by former colonies to apportion all post-independence misfortunes colonies to the master, are disingenuous, and are often anchored on activist disposition than on facts. At any rate, few nations on earth do not have their own history of subjugation.

Starting around 700 BC, for instance, Britain itself was variously colonised, sometimes informally, by Celts, Romans Saxtons, Jutes and others. Up until independence in 1776, the USA was likewise a British Colony. The well-known history of the Jews is among the most tragic.

Their enslavement by ancient Egyptians, rule by Midianites and Philistines, and their tragic deportation to Babylon are well chronicled in the Bible, while the Holocaust in which six million of them were summarily exterminated by Hitler is probably worse than the colonial experience of any other nation.

Similarly, the Chinese lost Hong Kong to British control up to as recently as 1997, enduring a whopping 156 years of thievery of their prime acreage.

What is notable is that the nations enumerated above somehow rebounded from foreign occupation to become the military, economic and political pillars of the modern world.

Therefore, viewed through the prism of a previous era, colonialism and subjugation have a silver lining, and can be said to have been somewhat inevitable rites of passage, bitter tonics by which nations were given stronger and more modern rebirth.

The case of Africa should not be any different. Instead of perennially whining, there is a way in which we can consume our colonial experience to our advantage.

It was indisputably necessary for African communities to interact with the colonialists, ostensibly as a dress rehearsal for later becoming able players in the comity of nations, in a world that was to become inevitably dominated by Western thought, language and political systems.

It is quickly observable that besides Japan, very few nations that did not experience colonialism went on to become outstanding in matters industrialisation.

It would have been marvelous for African countries to remain pristine and unmarred by any colonial hands, wouldn't it?

Yet in a technologically advancing world, the price would have been too steep: we would have been left behind like the 'uncontacted tribes' of Brazil.

Dr John Wahome is a lecturer at Laikipia University