. . . or Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi, who attacked the “gay scourge” sweeping Africa;
. . . or Zambia’s Frederick Chiluba, who has said gays do not have “a right to be abnormal”;
. . . or Namibia’s Sam Nujoma, who accused African homosexuals of being closet “Europeans” trying to destroy his country through the spread of “gayism”;
. . . or Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, who proposed the arrest of all homosexuals, though he subsequently moderated his position and called for a return to the good old days when “these few individuals were either ignored or speared and killed by their parents.”
But no doubt Decca Aitkenhead would respond that African homophobia is also the malign legacy of British colonialism. Who taught them to spear gays, eh?
By refusing to enslave them and take them to our Caribbean plantations and sodomize them every night, we left them with feelings of rejection and humiliation that laid the foundations of their homophobic architecture. The point to remember is, as the Guardian headline writer put it, cutting to the chase, “Their homophobia is our fault.”
And it always will be. It’s forty years since Jamaican independence, but in four hundred years, if there are any Englishmen left (which is demographically doubtful), Guardian columnists will still be sticking it to them for the psychological damage of colonialism.
How heartening to know that, at a time when so many quaint old British traditions are being abolished—foxhunting, free speech, national sovereignty—the traditional British leftist colonial guilt complex is alive and well. Even with hardly any colonies left.
When, say, Mahmoud Bakri of the Egyptian weekly al-Usbu, writes that the tsunamis were caused by Zionist nuclear testing, we roll our eyes. But, in the mass derangement stakes, blaming everything on the Jews is, if anything, marginally less loopy than blaming everything on yourself. One thing you notice, for example, in the Indian Ocean is that the countries making up the core group co-ordinating relief efforts—America, Australia, India, Japan—are three-quarters British-derived. The same can be said of the most effective second-tier nations involved, such as Singapore and Malaysia. A healthy culture should be able to weigh the pros and cons of the Britannic inheritance in a balanced way. But the wilful perverseness of Miss Aitkenhead’s argument suggests that, if anything, it’s the mother country that’s been psychologically damaged by imperialism.
As for the notion that even the randiest plantation owner could sodomize so many male slaves that he could inculcate an ingrained homophobia enduring for centuries, that’s a bit of a stretch even for advanced western self-loathers. Colin Powell, the son of Jamaicans, recalls it rather differently: “The British were mostly absentee landlords, and West Indians were mostly left on their own.”
Can absentee landlords be absentee sodomites? I’ll leave that one for Guardian columnists. But, before her next intervention in this area, the Queen might like to ponder the motives underlying all the sappy diversity blather. The British have always been open to other cultures: that’s one reason they made much better imperialists than the French or the Belgians. But “multiculturalism” is really a suicide cult conceived by the western elites not to celebrate all cultures, but to deny their own. And that’s particularly unworthy of the British, whose language, culture, and law have been the single greatest force for good in this world.
This isn’t merely a question for the history books, but the issue that underpins all the others facing the country today, not least the European Constitution: at a time when the benefits of the Britannic inheritance are more and more apparent everywhere else, how come Britain has no use for them?
Robert Mugabe subsequently warmed to his theme, and called Tony Blair a “gay gangster” leading “the gay government of the gay United gay Kingdom.” A Downing Street spokesgay denied the charge: “The Prime Minister is not a gay gangster.”
SON OF EMPIRE
In a basic sense, the essay below is wrong: Colin Powell chose not to run for the presidency. But I reread the piece in light of the man who, twelve years later, did become “the first black president.” Like Colin Powell, Barack Obama is the son of a British subject—in his case from Kenya rather than Jamaica—and so America’s first black president is, as Powell would have been, a man whose family history lies wholly outside the African-American experience. Of course, the big difference between them with regard to their British roots is that one loves them while the other loathes them:
The Spectator, September 29, 1995
IF YOU’RE NOT excited by the prospect of a black president of the United States look at it this way: if Colin Powell runs and wins, he’ll be the first president since the Civil War to be the son of British subjects.
True, most American leaders, from Washington to Clinton, have been of Anglo-Celtic stock, but you have to go back to the first generation of Americans, to the children of George III’s rebellious colonists, to find, so to speak, as British a president.
Pick up General Powell’s freshly minted bestseller, My American Journey, and the first thing you see, even before the preface, are the original British passport photographs of Luther Theophilus Powell and Maud Ariel McKoy, taken just before they left Jamaica for America in the 1920s. They’re the earliest pictures General Powell has of his parents. The English, having psychologically written off the Empire, no longer think of Jamaicans as British, but the General does: again and again, in emphasizing his Jamaicanness he also emphasizes Jamaica’s Britishness.
Turn the page and the second thing you see is his grandparents’ tiny cottage in St. Elizabeth parish. The text—his “American journey”—begins, in fact, with a British journey—to a small Caribbean outpost of Her Majesty’s Dominions and an inspection of the Jamaican Defence Force: “All very British and very professional,” he writes, approvingly. To the end, Mom and Pop referred to Jamaica as “home,” and that’s the culture in which young Colin was raised.
In many American memoirs, there’s a moment, usually cringe-making for British readers, when the celebrity Yank visits “the old country” and talks about how he feels that he’s “coming home.” In General Powell’s book, the equivalent passages are unusually persuasive and intense. He recalls addressing the British-American Parliamentary Group at Westminster: “The image of my mother and father, born as humble British subjects in a tiny tropical colony, flashed before me, and I wished they could see where fate had taken their son.”
He didn’t come across their faded British passports until December 1993, just before another trip to London: “The son of those two solemn-faced black immigrants from a tiny British colony was off to be knighted by the Queen of England.”
Yet, even as he savors the scene, he’s grateful he’s only an honorary KCB:
Had my parents remained British subjects, I would now be “Sir Colin” and Alma “Lady Powell.” On the other hand, if my parents had stayed in Jamaica, I can’t imagine I would ever have been knighted. If Luther and Ariel had shipped out for Southampton instead of New York City, I might have made sergeant major in a modest British regiment, but not likely British Chief of Defence Staff. I treasure my family’s British roots, but I love our America, land of opportunity.
He’s right: How many black generals does the British Army have? Powell would probably have left as a disenchanted squaddie and wound up in Brixton competing with John Major for a job on the buses. As National Security Advisor, General Powell meets Sir Charles Powell1 and is amused to discover that he’s actually Sir Charles “Pole”: there’s quite a lot on pronunciation in the book—the General’s family still call him “Collin,” in the British style, rather than “Coe-lin,” as the American public does, and at the height of the Gulf War he still found time to write to the London Times on the matter. But it was easier to Americanize his Christian name than it would have been to Anglicize his surname, easier to be General Coelin Powell than to become General Sir Colin Pole.
Nonetheless, in searching for reasons as to why white America seems prepar
ed to abandon its oldest and most enduring prejudice, you come back, always, to the Britishness of Colin Powell. In rare moments of honesty, whites will tell you that the black leaders blacks like scare the pants off ’em. Watching “The Reverends” Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, or Marion Barry, Washington’s born-again crackhead mayor, on television, roaring their grievance jingles, whipping up the crowd with hallelujahs and hollerin’ and other pseudo-religiosity has most middle-class whites making a mental note to order a new security system: all that shouting, all that noise, all that anger. Colin Powell doesn’t shout. He’s not a southern Baptist, but an Anglican, a man who likes the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer and the quiet dignity of the old liturgy.
When he recalls the way his Gran’ma’s English “wedded African cadence to British inflection, the sound of which is still music to my soul,” you’re reminded that, though he’s less musical, less sing-songy, his vocal timbre is closer to the soft-spoken authority of Caribbeans like Michael Manley and Lynden Pindling. Whitey likes Colin Powell because he’s the antithesis of the angry, resentful black man full of “black rage”—the deeply ingrained fury at centuries of oppression which ingenious lawyers have managed to get accepted as mitigating circumstances even unto murder.
So why isn’t this particular black man full of hate? “For one thing, the British ended slavery in the Caribbean in 1833, well over a generation before America did. And after abolition, the lingering weight of servitude did not persist as long,” he writes.
After the British ended slavery, they told my ancestors that they were now British citizens with all the rights of any subject of the Crown. That was an exaggeration; still, the British did establish good schools and made attendance mandatory. They filled the lower ranks of the civil service with blacks. Consequently, West Indians had an opportunity to develop attitudes of independence, self-responsibility and self-worth. They did not have their individual dignity beaten down for three hundred years.
Most of General Powell’s television interviewers haven’t read his book, but, if they did, they’d realize their preferred label isn’t quite the story: General Powell is certainly black, but is he “African-American”? Even the mandatory sense of rhythm, calypso excepted, has gone missing: “Jamaican miscegenation,” he pleads, “had blocked passage of both the basketball and the dance genes in me.” It gets worse: his favorite composer is Andrew Lloyd Webber. (“Is this guy even black?” wondered Jesse Jackson.) Commentators have puzzled over why the General commands less support among blacks than whites. For what it’s worth, most of those to whom I’ve spoken seem to regard him as a honkies’ patsy. Not to mention that there has never, ever, been a genuine black American called “Colin.”
There is in any case a long-standing distrust by African-Americans of West Indians. They call them “black Jews.” Caribbean blacks have a tradition of higher achievement in America: in the Fifties, Harry Belafonte became one of the first big-selling album artists; in the Sixties, Sidney Poitier became the first black movie star to bed a white actress in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? The film seems tame stuff now: Hepburn and Tracy are supposedly shocked by their daughter’s colored boyfriend, but who wouldn’t want Sidney Poitier for a son-in-law? Well, Powell’s in the Poitier role, with America happy to be romanced like Katharine Houghton. You can’t blame the likes of Reverend Jackson for feeling miffed that, after decades of marches and bussing protests and lunch-counter demos, black America should have foisted on it a man who skipped all that, whose father got off the banana boat and followed the Jews uptown.
“Get over it,” Mayor Barry told Washington’s stunned white voters on the eve of his re-election, in between thanking the Lord for his deliverance from cocaine. But it’s black America that can’t get over it, that can’t seem to flush the poison of racism from its system. General Powell’s trump card is that he never had to get over it—because he grew up within a British West Indian sensibility. That reference to “miscegenation” would, in American terms, usually mean a plantation owner with a penchant for pleasuring himself with his slaves; in Colin Powell’s case, it refers to his maternal grandfather, a Scots overseer on a sugar plantation, who took the General’s gran’ma as his wife and fathered nine children by her. That would have been illegal in most American states.
As blacks put it, they were specifically excluded from the American Dream: where most immigrants arrived in America to escape oppression, blacks were brought here in order to endure it. There again General Powell is at odds with the broader narrative: “Mom and Pop chose to emigrate to this country for the same reason that Italians, Irish and Hungarians did, to seek better lives for themselves and their children.”
Where most blacks have been contemptuous of the myths of Ellis Island, the General is now claiming to be their most potent exemplar: Irving Berlin, Sam Goldwyn, sure, all very impressive, but not till now has a son of that great immigrant tide of the early twentieth century presumed to claim the top prize of all. How odd that it takes a Powell not a Pole, a Scots-Jamaican rather than an Italian or Greek or Russian Jew, to complete that long journey from the Lower East Side to the White House.
So, even as they prepare to break with that long line of Anglo-Celts, Americans re-affirm their nation’s cultural and constitutional origins. General Powell belongs (as I do) to that wider British family beyond its shores, which the United Kingdom, in its morbid Euro-resigned defeatism, has managed to shrug off within the space of a generation. He rightly cites the evenhandedness of British nationality—the first supranational nationality, the first citizenship of the modern era not to be defined by race or ethnicity. But when did you last hear an Englishman sing its praises?
He’s wrong on one point, though: had his folks stayed in Jamaica, he might well have been knighted. I think of all those group shots at all those Commonwealth Conferences, of the Queen surrounded by her black and brown prime ministers, a sight the British love to mock. But it shows a grace in transition few other societies have managed, the same grace which distinguishes General Powell and commends him to his fellow Americans, and seems set to make him the unlikeliest imperial bequest to the young republic; the first black president.
If Colin Powell does win, it will be hailed as a victory for black America or a victory for immigrant America, according to taste. But it will also be an unspoken vindication of the virtues of British Imperialism.
1Charles Powell was Private Secretary both to Mrs. Thatcher and her successor, John Major.
THE PEOPLE’S QUEEN
The National Post, November 11, 1999
AS READERS OF Monday’s Comment page may have noted, I passed a jolly evening last week at the Elks Lodge in Littleton, New Hampshire, in the company of George W. Bush. Immediately afterwards, I flew to London for dinner at Buckingham Palace.
“Wow! That’s quite a week,” said my assistant. “One minute, you’re with America’s next head of state. The next, you’re with Britain’s and Canada’s head of state.”
“Or look at it another way,” I said. “One minute, I’m at the Elks Lodge in Littleton. The next, I’m at Buckingham Palace.”
It would be invidious for me to disclose the reasons for the Palace’s call, if only because The Financial Post’s Linda McQuaig has already complained that I sound more like something from Monarchy than a Canadian newspaper column. But, at the risk of breaching the confidence of a private occasion, here’s an exchange that deserves to make it into the public prints:
One of my fellow guests at the Palace, remarking on the lack of agricultural workers in Britain, said that he now brought in young Australians and South Africans, who were able to make ninety to a hundred pounds a day (about sixty thousand dollars a year) picking onions.
“Crying all the way to the bank?” said the Duke of Edinburgh.
The next day, Australians went to the polls for their referendum on whether to dump the monarchy. The Queen won. Australia, we’d been told, wanted an elected head of state, and now it’s got
one. Yet, rather than respect the people’s verdict, the proponents of a republic flew into a rage. Aussies often refer to the English as “whinging Poms,” but you’ve never seen anyone whinge like the sore losers on the republican side when the electorate declined to agree with them.
The overwhelmingly republican press took defeat particularly hard: It seems Australians do resent a remote autocratic foreigner from thousands of miles away running the place and lording it over them. Unfortunately, it turned out to be Rupert Murdoch rather than Elizabeth Windsor. The media mogul overplayed his hand by declaring on his front page that he’d lived under three different systems (Aussie, British, American) and republics were best. John Howard, the Prime Minister, reminded Mr. Murdoch that he was now a U.S. citizen and, in an unguarded moment, apparently suggested that he “f**k off.” Even after the republican side had conceded, the Murdoch press seemed reluctant to accept the actual result: “Queen Hurt by No Vote Despite Win” was the headline on The Sunday Times of London. Mr. Murdoch’s poodle, anxious to please, began his report as follows: “The Queen was hurt and disappointed by the strength of republican feeling in Australia. . . .”
Come again? Her Majesty was “hurt and disappointed”? How does the Times hack know? He was down the pub with her? She’d called him at home, choked up with tears, to confide her innermost feelings? As the only journalist on the planet present at Buckingham Palace on the eve of the big vote, I think I can speak with complete authority on this matter when I say I haven’t a clue as to the Royal Family’s state of mind and private thoughts. I kept trying to slip Australia into the conversation, right up to the end when, as the Duke of Edinburgh was showing me the door and my carriage was about to turn back into a pumpkin, I opined that I thought the 1901 Australian constitution was rather better than the 1867 Canadian one. “Hmm,” he said, and made some sharp observations about the differences between the two forms of federalism. But, as to how they feel about losing their antipodean throne, who knows?