The legacy of colonialism is generally an unpleasant and offensive one, and even the most unpleasant and offensive expatriate is generally aware of this.
On the level of global economics, we have the conjoined twins of the IMF and the World Bank, whose leadership shifts between Europe and America, ignoring Africa except as a recipient of counterproductive ‘Aid’.
On the level of international communities, there’s the UN, whose major bodies often exclude the African continent; or there’s the Commonwealth, which does nothing at all except remind individual African states of their former dependency whilst, also, giving the Queen a job in her dotage.
But on a day to day level, and although he pays lip-service to the idea that colonialism was terrible, the expatriate secretly loves everything that stems from that era, from safari-type clothing to that oak tree planted by Grogan, to the statue of Queen Victoria in Jevanjee Gardens. Indeed, what binds the expatriate community is a nostalgia for a period and lifestyle that their own ancestors never lived.
They even have magazines dedicated to encouraging this nostalgia, with names such as ‘Authentically Antiquated Afrika’. These whitey-edited magazines feature pictures of naked natives from times gone by, and this is thought to be okay, to be different from the ‘old type of racism’, because it’s done, ahem, ‘retrospectively’.
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This is of course debatable. These magazines print letters sent in from old Kenya hands or expatriates, with little stories: ‘Dear Editor, please find enclosed a picture of great uncle Walter with his faithful servant Magalongi (I sometimes think the contributors deliberately make names up) with a rhinoceros around his neck, which he shot for the Viceroy of Ceylon, who visited him at his ranch in 1939, some few decades before all that awful trouble with the loss of British East Africa. Sincerely, Colonel Blathernob’.
This nostalgia prompts the expatriate to hold very clear opinions on numerous issues. For instance, he is opposed to the SGR, not because of the great expense that will see all our children indebted for years to come, but because it supersedes what he thinks is a perfectly fine narrow-gauge railway, which is perfectly fine because it’s ‘British’.
The new, Chinese-built SGR is a reminder to the EuroAmerican that his form of colonialism is truly over, and that somebody else (from Asia, of all places) has become the new influence. Given the opportunity, this expatriate will remind anyone who cares to listen (rightly, few do) that ‘It was us who taught the Asians how to build railways’. Which isn’t entirely true; try telling this to a ‘coolie’. And, anyway, who calls the Chinese ‘Asians’ without deservedly getting a punch on the nose?
The truth is that colonialism did nothing for Kenya that Kenya couldn’t, in its own way, have done more responsibly and valuably itself for itself, differently, but certainly less vilely. If that was a complex sentence, it’s because it’s written to contradict a cheaply simplistic nostalgia of a sort that we shouldn’t celebrate.
stepartington@yahoo.co.uk
