Page 78 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 5

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British police. Ironically, accord- tional predicament obliges us to
ing to latest figures published by try and understand the current
the British police itself, hate and preoccupations of race, culture
religious crimes rose 41%after Why should these and justice in the larger historical
Britain voted to leave the EU. A settings. Bearing in mind what
national poll carried out in 2019 anxieties over Paul Gilroy once posited, that
found that in the seven months post-Brexit whatever the immediate institu-
following the Brexit vote, over a tional settings, the residues of
third of black, Asian or minority Britain be the imperial and colonial culture live
people in Britain had witnessed on whatever ‘race’ is invoked.
or experienced racial abuse. black man’s bur- Race, or as Gilroy rather puts
Post-colonial Melancholia den all over it, “the presence of supposedly
Over the years, some of us who alien peoples”, constitutes the
have advocated for the idea that again? visible link to a cultural pathol-
there ought to be a political or ogy which reaches into the in-
ethical obligation for Britain to nermost ways in which British
deal with racism and its conse- Looking back, the British Empire society operates today. Indeed
quences have been dismissed violently captured and then later- for ages, arguments over racial
by the establishment as endors- left Kenya and its other regional divisions, over who is human
ers of victimology, threatening colonies poor and devastated. enough to qualify for rights and
Britain’s universal and liberal Arecent London School of Eco- recognition have impinged upon
standards of justice and gover- nomics report has rightly noted the formation of epistemological
nance. My argument was, and that although Kenya’s current and ethical as well as historical
still is, that today’s socio-cultur- constitution of 2010 introduced and political categories. During
al and socio-political conflicts so-called democracy, it was the 20th century, these argu-
which characterize the relation overlaid onto a set of adminis- ments became closely connect-
between Africans and the Brit- trative structures and doctrines ed with the complex demands
ish political and justice estab- which had developed since the for justice and freedom made
lishments are firmly rooted in imposition of Crown Colony rule by Africans and other colonized
Britain’s imperial and colonial of Kenya in 1920. During the people bent on changing their
histories. Though that history re- colonial time, the resolute im- political status by seeking liber-
mains marginal and largely un- perialist Winston Churchill is on ty from and equality with those
acknowledged, surfacing only in record as having shamelessly who had colonized them.
the service of nostalgia and mel- declared that ‘every white man
ancholia, it represents a store of in Nairobi is a politician’, and In Afrikology we learn that the
unlikely connections and com- for that reason, whatever their new account of alienation that
plex interpretative resources. divergent views, he argued that is drawn from the experienc-
This is because the imperial and the white settlers had a duty to es of Africans in Britain in a
colonial life continues to shape transform Kenya into a haven post-Brexit age, alienation ex-
political life in a developed but for white farmers, paid for not by ists when the self is deeply di-
no longer ‘great’ Britain. So that, Britain but by indigenous Ken- vided because the hostility of
in a way, when the inspector yans – and not simply in terms the dominant white group in
said to the Kenyan immigrant: of cheap labor, but by taxation society forces the self to see
“so I can’t confirm if you are too. Churchill’s ideas later saw itself as loathsome, defective,
charged with an offence; only prime farming highlands to the or insignificant, and lacking the
that you are under arrest. Pro- north of Nairobi designated a possibility of ever seeing itself
claiming your innocence does whites-only territory and Kenyan in more positive terms. More
not redound well upon you”, he natives were banned from grow- fundamentally, through the epis-
was speaking of a person like ing coffee and cotton. temic explanation of Afrikology,
me and my encounter with the one sees clearly that the root
voices coming out of what Ngugi Afrikology and the Integrative idea of the post-Brexit raciology
wa Thiongo baptized as ‘centres Paradigm is aimed at forcing Africans and
outside of Europe’. The on-going post-Brexit transi- other elements representative of

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