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00:07More than a quarter of all the nations on Earth are former British colonies.
00:13And scattered across the world are the ruins of the British Empire.
00:18Statues to kings and viceroys, slave fortresses, plantations, schools, railways, and prisons.
00:30At its height, the British Empire, the biggest there has ever been, ruled over a fifth of the world's land surface and almost a quarter of its people.
00:41And perhaps the greatest legacy of the British Empire is a living legacy.
00:47There are today literally billions of people whose ancestors, in different ways, were part of this story.
00:55For this episode, we asked people from across the world to share their views on the contested histories and the modern hybrid identities that were left behind when after four centuries the British Empire finally came to an end.
01:11Stories of Empire, we flatten out people within them.
01:14Everybody who was British behaved in one way.
01:17Everybody who was Indian behaved in one way.
01:19So whether something is ethical or unethical, how they interacted, what they felt, we lose a lot of that richness and I think it's a shame.
01:27I don't think that there is only kind of one side to the story of Empire.
01:32You know, not everything was negative.
01:35Histories of Empire really do allow us to understand, you know, why there's so many people from Caribbean, Asia, and everywhere else here now.
01:42Looking back on my life and reflecting on choices that I made, an indigenous woman in the middle of Britain, who would have thought talking to you now about the impact that that colonialism has had on my people.
01:57That's me. That's who I am. I'm an Umaha Wa'ubadi.
02:12The history of the British Empire lives on across the world, even here on the Great Plains of Canada, in the vast spaces of the province of Alberta and the tiny city of Medicine Hat.
02:33And here, in the vaults of the local museum, is an object so precious to the indigenous Kainai community that before it can be revealed, it has to be blessed in a traditional ceremony.
02:48The object is something I've known about for years, but what I haven't realised until this moment is just what it means to the Kainai people.
02:57Because to carry out the ceremony that's needed for me as an outsider to view it, a teepee has been erected here and elders from the tribe have gathered to carry out that ceremony.
03:09Because this object is a vital piece of their history, but it's also a piece of history of the British Empire.
03:18The object in question is known as the Great War Deeds of Mike Mountain Horse.
03:24Mike Mountain Horse was a member of the Kainai Blood Tribe, who, as a subject of the British Empire, took the warrior traditions of his people into a war his ancestors could not have imagined.
03:38The first world war.
03:45Each of these panels represents a memory, an event that Mike Mountain Horse lived through on the Western Front.
03:56His war deeds depict the trenches.
04:03Shells detonating over the heads of the figures.
04:09Artillery, explosions and death.
04:15Over a century after he returned from the trenches, his descendants revere this object.
04:25It is both part of their spiritual world and, as much as any document in any archive, it is a record of history.
04:34What do the war deeds of Mike Mountain Horse mean to you and your people spiritually?
04:43For him to sign on a dotted line to protect his country, in a much bigger stage, he must have had a great understanding of the purpose he had in his life.
04:57Millions of men got back from the Western Front, traumatized.
05:06Is the painting a form of therapy for someone like Mike Mountain Horse?
05:10Oh, definitely.
05:11To be able to share the difficult things that he went through and putting it on at Hyde is to tell everybody in the world this is what happened, you know.
05:22So it went from here to there.
05:24But the result is also something which is a piece of history.
05:27That's right.
05:28That's right.
05:29We didn't write anything down.
05:31A lot of the teachings that we have, because of our oral history, it's really an experiential learning.
05:40That's right.
05:41That's right.
05:42That's right.
05:43That's right.
05:44That's right.
05:45That's right.
05:52The homelands of the Kainai people.
05:55The landscape Mike Mountain Horse knew lie four and a half thousand miles from the battlefields of Europe.
06:03Part of the Canadian prairies, it is a land of vast plains and deep river valleys.
06:09Home to the reserves and the settlements on which many Kainai people still live.
06:15This landscape could hardly be more different from the fields of France and Belgium where the Western Front stood.
06:23And Mike Mountain Horse found himself on the Western Front because he and his people were subjects of the British Empire.
06:31And in the early years of the 20th century, after more than 300 years of empire building, that meant that he was part of a vast global system that in all sorts of ways tied together over 400 million people, almost one in four of everybody on the planet.
06:53And perhaps nothing gets across the scale and the reach and the diversity of that empire than the fact that people who lived in places as remote as this could find themselves transported across oceans to fight and to labor in the name of that empire.
07:12Mike Mountain Horse was one of 4,000 indigenous Canadians who fought in the name of the British Empire.
07:24And they were not alone.
07:27Volunteers from the Caribbean colonies rushed to join the British Army.
07:31Thousands of Africans were recruited to take the war to Germany's African Empire.
07:37And from India, over a million men were sent to the Western Front and the Middle East.
07:44With many Indians supporting the war in the hope that their loyalty would win them a greater voice in Indian politics.
07:53The First World War ended not only with victory for the forces of Britain and its empire, but with the last great expansion of that empire.
08:03Because it was in the years after the war, in the early 1920s, as Britain took over the colonies of the defeated powers, that the empire reached its maximum size.
08:15And yet, at that moment, as the Union flag was raised over new colonies, the empire was just one generation away from collapse.
08:26The idea that the empire was approaching its final decades would have seemed ridiculous to the thousands who gathered here on this ridge to the north of Delhi in the year 1911.
08:46Because this was the site of perhaps the most flamboyant ceremony in the whole history of the British Empire.
08:55The Grand Durbar of King George V.
08:59200 Indian princes, along with the British officials and soldiers who administered the Raj and tens of thousands of guests, gathered here to offer obeisance to the King Emperor.
09:11This monument marks the exact spot from which the King surveyed the scene and gave a historic speech.
09:23At the very end of his speech, this British King informed the Indian people that the capital city of their country was to change.
09:32India was no longer to be ruled from Calcutta, the city from which the old East India Company had grown rich and powerful back in the 18th century.
09:42Modern 20th century India was to be ruled from Delhi.
09:47But this wasn't simply to be a transfer of power from one city to another.
09:53A new city, a new Delhi, was to be created.
09:57The Durbar of 1911 was part of a strategy that had been developed in the decades since the so-called Indian Mutiny.
10:10The British aimed to inspire loyalty among their Indian subjects by using spectacle and by co-opting Indian traditions.
10:20But the Durbar and the decision to move the capital also reflected a new imperial reality.
10:27Historian Swapna Little has written about New Delhi and about why it was built.
10:34What does it say about British power in India, this decision to create this new capital?
10:41The kind of state that the British Empire was, was one that sought at least a semblance of legitimacy in the eyes of the Indian people.
10:52And when we come to the beginning of the 20th century was fighting this difficult battle with Indians who were demanding more and more and being denied again and again.
11:03Because this is the age of the rise of Indian nationalism.
11:05So there's a rethinking of the image of empire.
11:10And the idea was that we have to give in to some of the, shall we say, reasonable demands.
11:17But how do you make the British Raj more acceptable in Indian eyes?
11:22And the idea is Delhi in order to reduce British Indian government's role to that of an imperial power, giving more autonomy to provinces.
11:34So it's a devolution.
11:35But under British control.
11:37Yes. And this is what brings us to why Delhi.
11:40Because then you are remaking the British Raj in the image of, shall we say, other Indian empires.
11:48It was the capital of the Mughals.
11:50It was the capital of earlier Sultanates before that.
11:53So it has that aura of power.
11:56The architects are given this very clear brief that you must draw on this legacy of imperial monumental architecture around you in order to design this city.
12:09So the planning of the city, for instance, this central vista, which came to be called King's Way, is exactly parallel to Chandani Chowk, the main ceremonial avenue of the Mughal city.
12:21And the use of red sandstone.
12:24And this is the material of which a lot of the monumental imperial architecture in Delhi of earlier eras is also built.
12:32So you have the Red Fort, for instance.
12:34It's not easy to transport all of this here, but they think it worth their while to do this.
12:39The appeal of Delhi was that it had all of these associations with past great Indian empires, but all of those empires had fallen.
12:48So in a way, there were those at the time who thought this was kind of a bad omen to move to Delhi, to be surrounded by the ruins of earlier empires.
12:56It's interesting that all the objections to this program actually come from prominent conservative British voices.
13:03There are very few Indians who are against this.
13:06In fact, they are all for it.
13:08The Indians recognize it for the concession it is to Indian demands.
13:13Their strategy is, let's go to the next step now. Let's ask for more.
13:17So the symbolism, the taking of these motifs and designs from Mughal history, that's appreciated, but it's not enough.
13:24It's one step in a series of demands.
13:26Absolutely.
13:27The British seem surprised by it, but really they shouldn't have been because British responses never kept up with what Indians would demand.
13:37And this is an inexorable march towards independence.
13:46The new capital for the new phase of British imperial rule in India took 20 years to build.
13:5250 miles of roads were cut across a city of parliaments, ministries, homes and shops that covered 62 square miles.
14:05The original cost was over 10 and a half million pounds, almost a billion pounds in today's money.
14:14The official opening of New Delhi took place two decades after the plan to move the capital from Calcutta had first been announced.
14:22The building of this city, the building of all of this, that had been achieved at colossal expense.
14:29This city was regarded as such a priority that work continued even through the darkest years of the First World War.
14:37But the year in which that grand inauguration ceremony took place, that was 1931, just eight years before the outbreak of a Second World War.
14:50When the empire went to war in 1939, attitudes towards the conflict and towards the empire were very different to those that had dominated back in 1914,
15:03when India's ruling elite had embraced the outbreak of that war as a chance to win concessions.
15:10In 1939, the coming of war intensified the growing campaign for an end to British rule,
15:18a reality that was concealed behind the wartime propaganda.
15:23This poster was produced in 1941 by the Ministry of Information, Britain's wartime propaganda ministry.
15:32And it projects the image that the government wanted to project.
15:35Under a fluttering Union flag are men representing the armed forces of Britain.
15:41In the front row is a British sailor, an Australian soldier and a Canadian airman.
15:47Behind them are soldiers from Britain and New Zealand.
15:52At the back is an Indian soldier.
15:55And the positioning of these men reflects the racial hierarchies of the British Empire.
16:01Because India's contribution in terms of soldiers was by far the greatest of any of the colonies.
16:07By 1945, the Indian army was two and a half million strong.
16:12Only at the very back, up in the corner, do we have a depiction of an African soldier.
16:18But looking at this poster here in India, underneath a memorial to Indian soldiers who died in the First World War,
16:27what is most striking is that this image bears almost no relation to reality.
16:33Because the war years here in India were not years of togetherness.
16:38They were years of mass political protest, years of British political oppression,
16:44and the years of a catastrophic famine in Bengal in which around three million Indians died.
16:51And at the end of the war, after all of that, it was obvious to many people that demands for Indian independence had just grown too strong.
17:01And that Britain, economically, militarily and politically, was just too weak to resist those demands.
17:08In 1946, the British government accepted the inevitable,
17:14and the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, was dispatched to India.
17:19He was tasked with plotting a path to independence,
17:23which by then, it had become clear, meant partition.
17:27And fearful that India could slide into a form of civil war, independence and partition were rushed.
17:36When Independence Day came in 1947, two nations emerged,
17:41and two independence ceremonies were held,
17:44one in Lahore in Pakistan,
17:47the other in the Parliament of New Delhi,
17:51the city from which the British had imagined
17:54that they would continue to rule over India.
17:59On the eve of independence,
18:01seven out of every ten subjects of the British Empire were Indian.
18:07At the stroke of midnight,
18:09those 400 million people became citizens of independent India or Pakistan.
18:16For two centuries, India had been an economic and military engine
18:20that had kept the whole system of empire working.
18:23It was in India that the British really learned how to be imperialists.
18:28India's economy had been tethered to the needs of Britain,
18:32and the Indian taxpayers had paid not just for their own colonisation,
18:36but for the development and the defence of other parts of the empire.
18:41And Indians themselves had been shipped right across the British Empire
18:45to grow sugarcane in the Caribbean and to build the railways in East Africa.
18:50India's people, India's economy had been key to making the British Empire possible.
18:57And then in 1947, with Britain exhausted and virtually bankrupt after five years of war,
19:05this whole system suddenly came to a violent end.
19:09The legacies of that moment of partition and of the violence that accompanied it
19:18are part of the family histories of millions of people.
19:22It was chaos. It was absolute chaos.
19:25It was one of the largest mass migrations in human history.
19:2815 million people displaced. So many deaths.
19:31The judge who was tasked with spitting India and Pakistan was only given five weeks.
19:38Our family would have had land in Sindh, and our home was in Jalandhar in Punjab in India.
19:45And in 1947, when the partition happened, Sindh fell into Pakistan and Jalandhar fell into India.
19:53And my great-grandparents were in Sindh at the time.
19:56What eventually transpired was my great-grandmother jumped into a well to save herself from either being abducted or raped.
20:08And my great-granddad died fighting, trying to protect himself and his family.
20:16They also had their daughter with them, my great-aunt, who also took her own life.
20:21And my granddad would have been a ten-year-old waiting in Jalandhar for his parents to come home.
20:29Despite the loss of India, Britain, after the Second World War, still ruled over tens of millions of people,
20:47scattered over dozens of colonies and protectorates,
20:50and in the self-governing dominions like Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
20:56But in the aftermath of the Second World War, Britain faced a crisis at home.
21:02Shortages of basic foods, like milk, eggs and cheese,
21:07were worse after 1945 than they had been during the war years,
21:12and rationing continued into the mid-1950s.
21:17The nation that had been the world's banker now had debts of £3.5 billion and was dependent upon loans from the United States.
21:30To generate income to pay off those vast debts and produce food for a British population desperate for better times,
21:38politicians turned their attention to the most neglected part of what was left of the empire.
21:45Africa.
21:48In the late 1940s, thousands of agriculturalists, climatologists and engineers were sent to Africa to launch an agricultural revolution.
21:59The most grandiose of the investments in Africa was focused on Kenya and Tanganyika, modern Tanzania.
22:08It was a vast scheme to grow groundnuts, peanuts that could be crushed for cooking oil.
22:14One of the everyday essentials in desperately short supply back in Britain.
22:20The whole scheme was built on the belief that modern machinery, heavy tractors and bulldozers,
22:29would simply be able to sweep away the vegetation here in East Africa.
22:34And then, when the land was cleared, crops could be planted and harvested again using the latest machinery.
22:42But the tractors imported into East Africa from America had been designed for the prairies of the American Midwest.
22:51They weren't strong enough.
22:53They just weren't resilient enough to take on this sort of dense African bushland.
22:59And so, there weren't enough spare parts.
23:02There wasn't enough space in the workshops to repair machines.
23:06There wasn't even enough diesel.
23:08And so, despite all of the ambition and all of the money thrown into it,
23:13the groundnut scheme very rapidly began to fall behind schedule and go over budget.
23:21The generation of experts and civil servants who were sent to Africa
23:26were almost all veterans of the Second World War.
23:29And they were proud of Britain's wartime tradition of overcoming obstacles by improvising.
23:35And so, when it became clear that the machines brought to Africa were not up to the task,
23:41they again improvised.
23:44580 Sherman tanks left over from the war were purchased.
23:50And the engineers at the Vickers factory in Newcastle removed the guns and the armour
23:56and converted Sherman tanks into heavy bulldozers, known as sherviks.
24:02Yet, even these sherviks, each of them weighing 18 tonnes,
24:07were not capable of clearing the land at the speed envisaged in the original plans.
24:13And across some of the areas identified for groundnut cultivation,
24:18the British planners encountered another enemy, the baobab tree.
24:23The teams that were sent out to clear the land for the groundnuts
24:29discovered that even converted Second World War tanks
24:33couldn't topple baobab trees.
24:36And even when baobab trees were cut down,
24:39it was almost impossible to remove their huge bulbous roots from the soil.
24:45And there is something ironic about this vast investment in the African Empire
24:52being stopped literally in its tracks by these trees.
24:56Because baobabs are not just enormous, they're also ancient.
25:01These trees can live for over 2,000 years,
25:05which means some of the baobabs that stood in the way of the groundnut scheme
25:10in the middle years of the 20th century,
25:13had been standing back in the first years of the 17th century,
25:18when the first English ship set sail to establish the first English colonies.
25:23These trees were older than the British Empire.
25:27These ancient trees and this ancient landscape,
25:32in the end, defeated the economic planners of post-war Britain.
25:38In 1951, the government finally cancelled the groundnut scheme,
25:43an imperial fantasy that had wasted 36 million pounds,
25:48a billion pounds in today's money.
25:52Britain's attempt to use its African colonies
25:55to solve its domestic problems had been a failure.
26:02Post-war Britain was not just blighted by shortages
26:05and burdened with debts,
26:07it was also devastated by years of bombing.
26:11The damage was so extensive that it was visible from the air.
26:16Just after the war,
26:18the aerial reconnaissance planes of the Royal Air Force
26:21that had been used to find targets in Germany during the war
26:24were deployed for a very different purpose.
26:29What the RAF produced was a huge aerial survey of the nation,
26:34a photographic doomsday book of Britain after six years of war.
26:39These are the docks of Liverpool.
26:42This is what is left of the centre of Bristol.
26:47And this is the devastation around St. Paul's Cathedral.
26:52The scale of the damage was enormous.
26:55The whole nation was in desperate need of reconstruction and modernisation.
27:01To rebuild the country,
27:04it was estimated that 1.3 million additional workers were needed.
27:10And one way the government set about finding them
27:12was by encouraging immigration.
27:14Between the late 40s and the 1960s,
27:17hundreds of thousands came from Ireland,
27:20thousands more from the displaced persons camps of Eastern Europe.
27:24And this place, Tilbury Docks,
27:27is famous today as the port into which one ship arrived.
27:31The Windrush, carrying hundreds of workers
27:34who had come to Britain from the Caribbean,
27:37Britain's oldest colonies.
27:41The passenger list of the Empire Windrush that arrived here at Tilbury
27:47on the 21st of June, 1948,
27:50has become a rather famous document in British history.
27:54And if we look in this column that describes the profession,
27:58occupation or calling of the passengers,
28:01we can see that many of the people coming to Britain
28:04on the Windrush to begin new lives
28:06have exactly the skills that post-war Britain desperately needed.
28:11So there's a gentleman here from British Guyana who is an engineer.
28:16On the following page,
28:18there's a long list of people arriving from Bermuda,
28:21and among them is a boilermaker.
28:24Here is an electrician.
28:26And there is, of course, a story to be told about these people,
28:30about their contribution, about the obstacles and the racism
28:34that they faced in post-war Britain.
28:37But there's another story about movement
28:40and about migration around the British Empire
28:43that we talk about a bit less.
28:46And that story can also be told through the stories
28:49of the ships that come here to Tilbury docks
28:52and the passengers who came through these arrival halls.
28:56This is another passenger list for another ship, the Malloyer.
29:02And that was here at Tilbury on the 10th of June, 1948.
29:07So 11 days before the Windrush arrived.
29:11And this, again, is a long list of passengers.
29:15But these people are not coming to Britain to start new lives.
29:20These people are emigrants.
29:22These are people leaving Britain.
29:24And they're headed to what this form describes
29:27as their country of intended future permanent residence,
29:33which in the case of all of these people
29:35is either Australia or it's New Zealand.
29:38And let's look at that same column,
29:41profession, occupation or calling of the passengers.
29:44And here we have a truck driver, a factory worker, a labourer.
29:49There's a woman here called Margaret Black.
29:52She's heading off for a new life in Australia.
29:55And under profession or occupation,
29:57she's listed as a hospital worker.
29:59And the timing here is what is critical.
30:01The Malloyer leaves Tilbury docks exactly 25 days
30:06before the new National Health Service opens its doors for the first time.
30:12And the first crisis faced by the NHS is a lack of hospital workers and nurses.
30:19And there are thousands of other nurses,
30:22thousands of other people with critical skills
30:24who leave on thousands of other ships in the years after 1945.
30:31Ever since the 17th century,
30:33the colonies had been places to which British people had travelled
30:37in the hope of transforming their fortunes.
30:40But the last great wave of Imperial emigration
30:44was unlike all those that had preceded it.
30:47Emigration had always been part of the story of the British Empire,
30:52but the emigration that takes place after the Second World War
30:55takes place in a very different context.
30:57Absolutely. In the 1920s,
30:59the British wanted to get people to emigrate to the Empire.
31:02There was high unemployment and there was a worry about overpopulation.
31:06After the Second World War, the story is radically different.
31:09There's a shortage of labour and actually a worry about population decrease.
31:13Nevertheless, emigration is back on the agenda.
31:16People want to go and the government wants to encourage people to go
31:19to the so-called white dominions.
31:22So this is Australia, New Zealand, Canada?
31:24Exactly.
31:25The old settler colonies?
31:26The old settler colonies,
31:27which were sometimes called the British Commonwealth of Nations,
31:30including the United Kingdom itself.
31:32And yet, even though they are desperately in need of every labourer,
31:38every worker, every skilled worker that they can keep,
31:41British governments not just encourage, they even subsidise emigration.
31:47They subsidise emigration.
31:49They want to maintain the British Empire as a world power.
31:53And it's been pulled apart as a world power because the United States is so strong.
31:57So Canada is getting closer to the United States, so are Australia and New Zealand.
32:02So the British government wants to send more British people,
32:05British stock is the phrase, to populate these places,
32:08so that they remain in some sense within the British orbit.
32:12They're worried that if, as actually happens,
32:15the Australians bring in displaced persons from Greece and from Italy,
32:19that Britishness will be diluted.
32:21So we have an extraordinary situation where the United Kingdom is exporting people.
32:26I mean, over a million people go in the late 40s and 1950s.
32:29In a country of less than 50 million?
32:31Yeah.
32:32That's a very considerable number of people.
32:34It is.
32:35Immigration into the UK is much lower than emigration.
32:40So the idea that we have that post-war Britain is a country of immigration
32:45from former empire is actually misleading because...
32:49Because it's small numbers, particularly in the 14s.
32:51It's small numbers, it's very small numbers.
32:53We're very aware that immigration from the Caribbean and from India
32:57is going to change Britain, but it's far more people come from Ireland.
33:02Far more people come from Ireland and more people from continental Europe, actually,
33:05than from the Caribbean or from India.
33:08And it's also important to note that the British government,
33:11like the Australian government, the Canadian government,
33:13want to keep the country white.
33:15Immigration from the Caribbean and India is absolutely not encouraged.
33:19They only want Europeans or British stock to come to their country.
33:25So it's a profoundly racist understanding that's at work here.
33:29And this is one of the big stories of the British Empire,
33:31one of the most forgotten stories that it was an empire of emigration.
33:35It's one of these remarkable cases where really, really important facets of our history
33:40are not common knowledge.
33:44By 1952, around half a million people had left Britain for the Commonwealth.
33:50But that year came to be remembered as the start of a new age,
33:55one that began not in Britain but in one of Britain's African colonies.
34:01This is Treetops, a safari lodge in Kenya.
34:06On 6 February 1952, the then Princess Elizabeth was here
34:11when her father, George VI, died and she became queen.
34:19Here in Kenya, Princess Elizabeth became queen not just of the United Kingdom,
34:24but of what in the early 50s, even after Indian independence, remained an enormous empire.
34:32And so, at the beginning of the Second Elizabethan Age,
34:36there was still the view within Britain's governing classes
34:39that despite the setbacks, despite the country's precarious finances,
34:44that the Commonwealth could still guarantee a degree of global influence
34:49and that there were parts of the empire, certain colonies in which British rule could continue
34:55in some form for decades, perhaps even for another generation.
35:02But the Second Elizabethan Age was not to be a new chapter in the history of the British Empire,
35:11but an age of decolonisation.
35:14In Africa and the Caribbean, demands for independence became irresistible.
35:20And in 1956, after independent Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal,
35:26the limits of British power were exposed
35:29when the United States forced Britain and her allies to withdraw after an invasion.
35:35With Britain's position in the world fatally undermined,
35:39the late 50s and the 1960s saw members of the British royal family
35:44become participants in a familiar ritual.
35:48At stadiums and racecourses across the world crowds were gathered,
35:55political leaders assembled,
35:57the Union flag was lowered and the new flags of new independent nations raised.
36:03The apparent ease with which the British negotiated the peaceful surrender
36:09of the empire they had spent centuries building
36:12was presented as one of the empire's last great achievements.
36:17The transition from empire to Commonwealth was portrayed almost as a miracle.
36:28And while there were many colonies in which British rule was peacefully dismantled,
36:34this was often not the case where white settlers had arrived in large numbers
36:39and taken control of the land, which was exactly the state of affairs
36:45in the colony in which the Second Elizabethan Age had begun.
36:50Over there is the Treetops Hotel that tourists from Britain have been visiting for decades
36:56to see the place where Princess Elizabeth became Queen Elizabeth.
37:00But that, that is not the original building.
37:05The original Treetops stood about here, where I am now.
37:10And the reason that it's not here now is because it was destroyed.
37:14It was burnt down just two years after the Queen had visited.
37:19It was a victim in a rebellion that broke out within months of the Queen's visit.
37:25The fertile highlands of Kenya had been identified as being suitable for white settlement
37:33back in the last years of the 19th century.
37:36And after both world wars, British veterans had been encouraged to settle here.
37:42By the 1950s, around 30,000 white farmers owned 12,000 square miles
37:49of the best land in Kenya.
37:52The Kukuyu, a people of over a million, owned just 2,000 square miles.
38:00Among the land taken from the Kukuyu
38:03was the land upon which the Treetops Lodge had been built.
38:07In 1952, when Queen Elizabeth was at Treetops,
38:11a movement was gaining support among the Kukuyu
38:14that aimed to recover their land and end British rule in Kenya.
38:19That movement was called the Land and Freedom Army.
38:25It was also known as Mau Mau.
38:28Although the vast majority of the people killed in the Mau Mau conflict were Africans,
38:34the killings of white settlers shocked the British authorities into action.
38:39Their response was a huge military deployment.
38:42Thousands of soldiers were sent to Kenya from Britain
38:46and from other African colonies.
38:50And the bombers of the RAF were used to bomb Mau Mau positions in the forests.
38:56But the British also set up camps
38:59in which hundreds of thousands of Kenyans were imprisoned,
39:03processed and interrogated.
39:06Today, in the 21st century, memories of what happened in those camps
39:11have returned to haunt both Kenya and Britain.
39:17In the countryside, 50 miles to the north of Nairobi,
39:20lies Meweru High School for Boys.
39:23But these buildings have been repurposed,
39:30because Meweru was not designed or built to be a school.
39:36These buildings were built back in the 1950s,
39:39and in recent years,
39:41Kenyan historians have gone back to the archives,
39:44back to old maps and official British documents
39:47to recover the story of what happened here and in places like it.
39:53Anthony Mayuna is one of those Kenyan historians,
39:56and his work has helped uncover what happened
39:59when Meweru was an internment camp
40:02and British colonial forces were based here.
40:06This building was a barracks,
40:08maintained with a hot shower, electricity and all that.
40:11So soldiers, this is where they live?
40:13Yes. There's a swimming pool nearby.
40:16There's a swimming pool?
40:17Yeah. In every camp,
40:18there was a swimming pool for the British officers.
40:20They used to also have a hangman.
40:22Was there a gallows in this camp?
40:25Yes. People were being hanged during the night.
40:28So it was not shown in the public.
40:30So the hangman would get up in the middle of the night?
40:32Yes. And people would be hanged?
40:33People who have been convicted to hang would be hanged.
40:36And then buried in unmarked graves.
40:39There must be graves just within the compound.
40:41Because so many people died here?
40:42Yeah.
40:43And are the children at this school taught what happened here?
40:46They know. In fact, they know.
40:48Those soldiers and that hangman
40:50may have been the people who killed their ancestors?
40:53Yes. But I think those people who are Maumau
40:57were very much traumatized.
41:00They don't speak so much about what happened.
41:04So you have this age
41:05where people don't want to talk about places like this?
41:07Exactly.
41:09At no other time in the history of the empire
41:13did the British authorities use the death penalty
41:16as regularly as they did in Kenya
41:19in the middle years of the 20th century.
41:221,090 Kenyans were hanged during the Maumau emergency.
41:30But Meweru School contains relics of other horrors.
41:35This room is a torture room, both physical and mental.
41:39A person was put here, removed from another detainist.
41:43And put into solitary confinement.
41:44Exactly.
41:45For you to confess, water was poured.
41:48The prison guards would fill the floor with water.
41:51And you have nowhere to sleep.
41:52So you have to leave this place.
41:54Left in the place being maimed, almost crippled.
41:59I can assure you, many of the detainists
42:02were castrated in this room.
42:05Castration.
42:06In this room?
42:07Yeah, I met survivors.
42:08In fact, I counted about three of them.
42:10How was that done?
42:11Pliers.
42:12With pliers?
42:13Yes.
42:14Oh, my God.
42:15This one.
42:16Those who could not survive died.
42:19And their next of kin could not be informed
42:22because it was something the colonial government
42:25wanted to hide about.
42:26In fact, I was told that there were more than 20 such cells
42:30within Meweru.
42:35I've been to the sites of former detention camps
42:38and former concentration camps all over the world.
42:41But I've never been to somewhere like this.
42:44A former camp in which people were abused and tortured.
42:49That isn't a museum or a heritage site,
42:51but that is a working school.
42:54And that decision to reclaim this history
42:57and to repurpose this site
42:59is one that's been taken very purposefully
43:01and very deliberately by many people in Kenya
43:04who were determined that this terrible chapter
43:08in Kenyan history not be forgotten.
43:11Back in the 1950s, when news broke of what was happening
43:17in places like this, there was an outcry in Britain.
43:21It was the killing of 11 Mau Mau detainees in another camp,
43:26a place called Holla, that led to the shutting down of the camps.
43:30By 1960, the Mau Mau rebellion had been defeated.
43:35And yet, to keep control,
43:37the British had been forced to make huge political concessions,
43:41concessions that led in 1963 to Kenyan independence.
43:47But in the months before the dignitaries and the crowds
43:50gathered for the independence ceremony in Nairobi,
43:53the British authorities had set out to control
43:56how the history of the British Empire in Kenya
43:59would be remembered.
44:01And in the last weeks of 1963,
44:04planes left Nairobi carrying crates of documents,
44:08just as documents had been removed
44:10in the final days of British rule in other colonies.
44:14Historian Riley Linebar has studied what happened
44:19in the archives of Britain's last colonies
44:22in the last years of empire.
44:25This document is from 1961
44:28and it's to be distributed, it says,
44:30among government officials in Nairobi, in Kenya.
44:34And it is very strikingly marked with a big letter W.
44:39What does that mean?
44:41The W stands for watch.
44:43It's a part of a new record-keeping system
44:45that this memorandum is describing.
44:471961, Kenya's constitutional independence is being negotiated.
44:52We're about two years away from independence itself.
44:54Two years away from independence.
44:56What the W here indicates
44:58is for any person handling this document,
45:01they know this is a secret.
45:03It should not be available for anyone to see
45:06unless deemed an authorized officer.
45:08Does it give us the criteria?
45:10It does.
45:11There's four criteria.
45:13A, prejudice the security of the Commonwealth
45:16or of any friendly state,
45:18or B, embarrass Her Majesty's government,
45:21or C, give a political party in power an unfair
45:26or improper advantage,
45:28or D, endanger a source of intelligence
45:31or render any individual vulnerable to victimization.
45:34Now, some of those criteria are entirely reasonable.
45:37Intelligence, the safety of people whose names appear in the documents.
45:41But point B about embarrassing the government,
45:45that's not about security.
45:47No, it's not clear what it's about.
45:51And so it provides those interpreting this memorandum
45:54a wide remit to decide for themselves
45:56what would be embarrassing or not.
45:59When a document has been stamped with a W, what becomes of it?
46:04Either it's slated to be removed to London,
46:08or, as the document itself will tell us,
46:11it will be destroyed.
46:13Some of the documents that received the W stamp were burnt
46:17or drowned in open water.
46:19This reveals how committed not only the colonial administration in Kenya was,
46:25but the colonial office in London,
46:27to keeping secret evidence of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya.
46:32So in this case, what they mean by
46:33might embarrass the government,
46:35they mean evidence of torture, of murder,
46:38of camps in which people were held for years?
46:41Correct.
46:42And all of this is being done in secret.
46:44It says secret at the top of each page of this document.
46:47It's all being done as a self-conscious act of secrecy.
46:51If we come here to point 15, indeed, the very existence of the watch series
46:57should never be revealed.
46:59And to the same end, the name legacy should not be used
47:02in a non-designated context.
47:04That title, Operation Legacy, that's fairytelling.
47:08There's a fear precisely of sort of an African reinterpretation
47:12of the history of the British Empire.
47:15How widespread is Operation Legacy?
47:17It's empire-wide.
47:19So this is a project of secret-keeping
47:21that is not limited to the transition to independence.
47:25And in fact, the project of record removal
47:27continued through the mid-1990s.
47:30One legacy of Operation Legacy is that
47:34it's enabled people even today to convince themselves
47:38that the British Empire was unique among all empires,
47:41in which it didn't have these crimes, these blemishes,
47:44these terrible incidents, these racism,
47:46all the things that are destroyed in the documents
47:48that are spirited away.
47:50It allows a sort of maintenance of a form of innocence.
47:53A form of innocence.
47:55And also, it has allowed a certain mythology and ignorance
47:59over the fact and reality of empire within the UK itself.
48:03The destruction of documents in Operation Legacy allowed certain parts
48:11of the history of empire to be forgotten.
48:14But that is not unique.
48:18After slavery was abolished, that history was slowly airbrushed
48:22out of the story of empire.
48:25The slave fortresses on the African coast were abandoned to the forests.
48:31The burial grounds on the plantations forgotten.
48:35The Australian families, descended from convicts,
48:38concealed their family histories.
48:41And some of the dynasties, grown rich from wealth acquired
48:45through the East India Company or in the West Indies,
48:48brushed those family stories under the carpet.
48:52One of the reasons this history is today re-emerging
48:59is because of another story fundamental to the British Empire.
49:04Immigration.
49:08After the Second World War,
49:10just as the empire itself was falling apart,
49:13the peoples of the empire, despite official disencouragement,
49:18began to settle in Britain in large numbers
49:21and become part of British society.
49:24I think as I've gotten older,
49:26I've begun to see that Britishness takes influence
49:30from so many parts of the world,
49:32and so many different communities have come to the UK
49:35and have brought bits of their culture,
49:38bits of vibrance to this country.
49:41People are kind of fed up of the story of empire being a monologue,
49:45told mainly by people who look and sound like me, frankly.
49:48There is a crisis in identity in Britain,
49:51and I think partly that is because we have not had a grown-up conversation
49:55about our history.
49:57Immigration from the former empire has created new,
50:00hybrid forms of British identity,
50:03which in turn have led to calls for a new,
50:06more inclusive version of British history.
50:09The fact that I've grown up here has meant that I do have this hybrid identity,
50:15and therefore I'm not afraid to talk about Britain in a light
50:19that perhaps is not positive all the time.
50:21There's a mistake with patriotism,
50:23which means that you must always speak about Britain in a positive light,
50:26but that's just not the case,
50:27because we need to look at British history as a whole.
50:30It is the reason why I have so much of the culture that I have today.
50:35It's the reason why I listen to circa music,
50:38and I eat Caribbean foods,
50:40and the mosque that I grew up in is an Indo-Caribbean mosque,
50:44and every Saturday that was my experience.
50:47And yet there is still the view, among some,
50:50that the history of empire is better off forgotten,
50:53or that the uncovering of this history
50:56is intended to make people feel guilty about events
50:59that took place before their birth.
51:02Learning the history hasn't made me hate Britain.
51:05The money that was created through slavery and empire,
51:08that's the money that I benefit from today,
51:11and the fact that that money was made from my ancestors,
51:14their, like, dehumanisation, exploitation,
51:17that is really complex.
51:19I've been on this journey to just discover my roots through London,
51:22because the Raj, the East India Company,
51:25events in World War I, World War II,
51:27all of that is the reason I'm here in London,
51:30and that's my story.
51:35As a historian, my attempts to make sense
51:38of my own hybrid identity takes me inevitably to the past,
51:43and to two sets of documents,
51:45both held here at the National Archives.
51:50Together, those documents very personally reveal
51:53just how deep the history of empire runs.
51:58The first set of documents are the official records
52:01of a tiny event in the story of the British Empire,
52:05an attack by British forces on a small African city
52:09in the year 1892.
52:13This map shows the routes that the British forces took
52:16as they marched towards their targets.
52:19And each of these symbols of a crossed sword,
52:22that is a small battle, an engagement that they had
52:26with the local African people.
52:28And right at the top of the map is their destination,
52:32their target, the town of Jebu Ode.
52:36Now that is the modern Nigerian town of Jebu Ode.
52:41Here is a map of the town with its defensive walls
52:46and its defensive ditch.
52:48Also among these documents is this list of the weapons
52:52and the ammunition that the British forces took with them
52:56on this raid.
52:58There is seven-pounder guns.
53:00That's artillery with 100 rounds.
53:03And there is a Maxim gun.
53:06And in 1892, this is just about the most high-tech weapon on Earth.
53:11And we know that these weapons were used with devastating effect
53:15because we have this account by one of the British officers.
53:20He says,
53:21Nearly all the principal chiefs had been killed or wounded
53:25and that there was not a household in Jebu Ode
53:28that did not mourn the loss of at least one of its members.
53:33Now, I've stood here in the archives many times
53:36and I've looked at documents and maps just like these
53:40because there are many small wars and punitive raids
53:44in the history of the British Empire.
53:47But these documents, to me, are a bit different
53:51because this town, Jebu Ode,
53:54is where the Nigerian half of my family come from.
53:58And when I look at this list of weapons,
54:02these were weapons that were used against people
54:06that I'm descended from.
54:09Other documents right here in the National Archives
54:13that really complicate the picture.
54:16This is the discharge papers of another of my ancestors.
54:23His name was David Ewart.
54:26And he was a Scottish soldier in the British Army.
54:29He fought in a regiment called the 78th Regiment of Foot.
54:34And that was a regiment that was sent to fight in India.
54:38This letter explains what their task was.
54:41It says that their job was to defend territory
54:45recently acquired by His Majesty's
54:47and the East India Company's arms in various parts of India.
54:53It was the private East India Company,
54:56not the British state, that paid David Ewart his army wages.
55:01And what all of this means is that I'm descended from a British colonial soldier
55:08and from Africans who were attacked by British colonial soldiers.
55:13And this complexity, this messiness, that is just a feature of the history of empire.
55:20A history that just can't be understood through ideas of pride and shame of them and us.
55:29And it's a history that we share with literally billions of people across the world.
55:34And whether we like it or not, whether we're comfortable with it or not,
55:39this is a history that runs too deep and matters too much for it to be brushed aside or wished away.
55:50Things are never as black and white as we think they are.
55:53And history is important. And I think people get really scared or upset that we're trying to take that away.
56:01When has ever knowing the truth about yourself and confronting your past,
56:07when has that ever been something that isn't beneficial to you?
56:11All we have are links and stories of each other.
56:15I don't think it's possible to think of empire and beyond that in any other way.
56:23We'll see you next time.
56:53.
56:56.
57:01.
57:03.
57:05.
57:06.
57:08.
57:12.
57:14.
57:16.
57:18.
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