You may be aware that it is currently Black History Month, an event that has been celebrated every October in the UK since the mid-1980s. It certainly seems more obvious this year; I don’t remember my local branch of Sainbury’s having multi-coloured BHM posters around the supermarket before, but perhaps I wasn’t paying attention. I’m more inclined to believe that this particular marketing decision was driven by last year’s Black Lives Matter campaigns, and is an attempt to show the company as inclusive. But maybe I’m just being cynical.
I’ve been involved in Black History Month ever since the early 2000s, when I was working for Birmingham Libraries. Given the diverse population of the city, Black History Month was given a significant profile by the city council, and funding to match. But working in this role also taught me that the idea of Black History Month is in itself controversial, seen by some as ghetto-ising a key strand of the UK’s history and keeping it in a box of 31 days, rather than ensuring black history is celebrated throughout the year.
I’m currently working on diversifying the KS3 English curriculum at my own school, and whilst we have made a start, I also know that it does take time. I’m reluctant to make tokenistic, knee-jerk changes, along the lines of ‘Poetry from Other Cultures’ units from days gone by. Instead, I’m trying to weave a diversity of voices through the whole of KS3, to try and create something not just more cohesive, but also more long-lasting. It’s not easy, but then the most important and worthwhile jobs often aren’t.
Which brings me to Empireland, Sathnam Sanghera’s insightful analysis into how Britain’s imperial past still shapes the country we live in today. The book is not always an easy read, although this has nothing to do with Sanghera’s prose, which is always clear, often witty, and meticulously researched. No, the parts of the book that made me wince were those sections that described the horrendous crimes committed in the name of Empire: massacres, famines and looting amongst them. Having only a vague grasp of how the British empire operated, Sanghera’s unflinching descriptions of what this meant in practice to the people being ruled brought the nature of these horrors home to me.
Sanghera uses the book to explore different themes related to the British empire, among them the acquisition of cultural objects, migration, and racism. In all of these, what is particularly striking is Sanghera’s refusal to accept easy answers. The binary nature of the question ‘was the British empire good or bad?’ ignores the very great complexities involved. It also leads to a fruitless argument, when in fact more productive discussions could take place – for example, about why looted items should be returned to the countries from which they were originally taken.
This particular debate ignores the fact that, for many British cultural institutions (including the British Museum), 90% of their collections are not on public display. This begs the question: just who are these ‘treasures’ being preserved for, in remaining in this country? Sanghera is also quick to highlight the ways in which government is becoming involved in what should be purely curatorial decisions. Threats to reduce funding are being made to any museums who are considering returning items to their country of origin, and Sanghera identifies these attempts as part of a wider culture war which also has its roots in empire.
Empireland is one of those books that is difficult to summarise, and is all the better for being so. It is certainly one that I will be thinking about for some time to come, and it raises questions that, difficult as they are to answer, affect us all.
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