by YVONNE SINGH

My great fear is that we are suffering from amnesia. I wrote to recover the memory of the human rainbow, which is in danger of being mutilated… We are much more than we are told. We are much more beautiful.’
Eduardo Galeano, 2013
‘A magisterial survey’ of the British Empire by Oxford ethics professor Nigel Biggar is lauded in the right-wing press. In Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, Biggar seeks to defend the Empire from its most egregious accusations – greed, racism, land theft, genocide and economic exploitation. Cover blurbs from supporters hail the study as: ‘A timely riposte to the ethically flawed and unhistorical campaign by Black Lives Matter [which] conflate[s] benevolent empire with slavery and, worse still, Nazism’ and ‘Any objective reader not blinded by woke prejudice will recognise that this [is] one of the great debates of our times: whether we should be ashamed by our forefathers.’
The study has riven academia and ignited the ever-glowing embers of the so-called culture wars. Our history has become ever more politicised, with the biggest casualty of such debates the public’s understanding of it.
The 2015 campaign Rhodes Must Fall, to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oxford High Street, which gained impetus again in 2020 following George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter protests, receives special attention from Biggar. Rhodes was a ‘moral mixture’, Biggar states, and not a racist, decrying the ‘shouty zealotry of small group of students’ and their academic supporters, and using selective facts to prop up his argument. The case of Rhodes Must Fall – that his policies of racial segregation led in later years to apartheid; that he promoted slavery in his diamond mines; that he stole African lands in nefarious ways – can all be explained within the context of time and place, explains Biggar. The anti-colonialists have distorted history for their own ends, he argues: their retrospective morality is essentially as flawed as a rough diamond’s surface, applying today’s ethics and morals to our ancestors’ deeds will of course cast them in a fractured light.
The truth is that there were plenty of people in the past calling out the abhorrent nature of Empire – it’s just that their voices have long been erased. From London to Oxford, to Liverpool and Glasgow, men of Empire are consecrated in marble, brass and stone, while those that challenged imperial largesse have no such commemoration, they are forgotten by history’s ebb.
No sculpted busts, bronze statues, street names or libraries, for example, exist in the UK’s major cities to celebrate Samuel Jules Celestine Edwards, a black newspaper editor who lived 140 years ago, and enthralled Victorian England, packing out halls and theatres with his lectures on racial justice and Empire. Born one generation removed from slavery on the island of Dominica, Edwards was brave enough to denounce the British Empire when it was at the zenith of its powers. Pre-empting Rhodes Must Fall by more than a century, he was a fierce critic of the legacy of the slave trade and imperialism, challenging Cecil Rhodes and the British South African Company following its murderous campaign in Matabeleland (now Zimbabwe). Edwards even had the intellectual courage to repudiate Charles Darwin.
At the height of his fame, Edwards was the editor of two anti-racist journals, Lux and Fraternity, a biographer and the author of a number of penny pamphlets.
In 1893, he toured the UK with the great American journalist and activist Ida B. Wells to educate the British public about the horrors of lynching and segregation in post-abolition America. The newspapers of the day were extravagant in their praise of Edwards’s rhetorical alchemy, with the words ‘eloquent’, ‘assured’ and ‘witty’ peppering reviews.1 Those that saw the couple tour declaimed them to be ‘the greatest public speakers… ever heard’ but shockingly few are aware of Edwards’s tragic story.
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August 1884. The Balloon Society of Great Britain meeting at the Royal Aquarium. Despite the name, this popular scientific, literary and art society did not just cater to fans of inflatables. The lecturer who was about to take the stage in one of the gallery halls that summer evening was palpably nervous. He was to face an audience of upper- to middle-class gentlemen. Among them baronets and colonels who had crossed the channel in silken balloons and wicker gondolas. Some were sitting in their military uniforms, veterans of the Crimean War, Opium Wars and Afghan campaigns, the gleam from their brass buttons and polished medals sending haphazard beams across the stage. Others were in the evening dress of the time, top hats and frock coats like the lecturer, their boutonnieres boasting a seasonal spray. Truly magnificent men in their flying machines.
The Royal Aquarium was a grand, hubristic Victorian project styled on the Crystal Palace of 1851. It boasted a main atrium 400ft long and 160ft wide, covered with a barrel-shaped roof of glass and iron that gave the impression of an ever-changing sky. Palm trees, shrubs and fountains furnished the entire length of the tiled promenade floor, while exotic vines entwined the ivory balconies. To give a sense of scale, statues of Neptune and his sea-horse and a 12-foot Britannica overlooked the space, while thirteen glass aquariums for marine and freshwater sea creatures lined either side of the main hall. Charles Dickens was said to have described the ‘beggarly’ contents as ‘a standing joke’. An attempt seven years earlier to transport a whale from Labrador, Canada, to display in one of the tanks ended in tragedy for the chosen cetacean. To be in the presence of this rumoured magnificent orator, the audience that night would have traversed this majestic promenade to reach the lecture theatre, and the hall buzzed with audible but restrained anticipation.
The speaker, Samuel Jules Celestine Edwards, was aware that the subjects he would broach that night would be controversial for his listeners. But he had faced much worse audiences. Two years earlier, as a 24-year-old Methodist missionary in south London, he had been assaulted with a hail of chewed tobacco by a rough music hall crowd. Seven years at sea as a child sailor and then as a young man, narrowly avoiding a series of life-and-death situations, had equipped him with a character of steel.
To polite applause, he challenged the notion that ‘[The formerly enslaved] are lazy and would rather be slaves than free men’. Citing his own family as an example, particularly his grandfather who had toiled and bought the liberty of his own children, he stated: ‘I believe the Negro is capable of higher and nobler things than you give them credit for, and when trained for as many years as you have been will make a nobler race and a better people than the present generation.’
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