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00:00More than a quarter of all the nations on earth are former British colonies.
00:07And scattered across the world are the ruins of the British Empire.
00:12Statues to kings and viceroys, slave fortresses, plantations, schools, railways and prisons.
00:23At its height the British Empire, the biggest there has ever been,
00:28ruled over a fifth of the world's land surface and almost a quarter of its people.
00:35And perhaps the greatest legacy of the British Empire is a living legacy.
00:41There are today literally billions of people whose ancestors in different ways were part of this story.
00:49For this episode, we asked people from across the world to share their views on the contested histories
00:56and the modern hybrid identities that were left behind when after four centuries the British Empire finally came to an end.
01:06Stories of empire, we flatten out people within them.
01:09Everybody who was British behaved in one way. Everybody who was Indian behaved in one way.
01:14So whether something is ethical or unethical, how they interacted, what they felt.
01:19We lose a lot of that richness and I think it's a shame.
01:22I don't think that there is only kind of one side to the story of empire.
01:26You know, not everything was negative.
01:29Histories of empire really do allow us to understand, you know, why there's so many people from Caribbean, Asia and everywhere else here now.
01:36Looking back on my life and reflecting on choices that I made.
01:41An indigenous woman in the middle of Britain? Who would have thought?
01:45Talking to you now about the impact that that colonialism has had on my people.
01:51That's me. That's who I am. I'm an Umaha Wa'ubadi.
01:55The history of the British Empire lives on across the world.
02:15Even here, on the great plains of Canada.
02:19In the vast spaces of the province of Alberta.
02:23And the tiny city of Medicine Hat.
02:30And here, in the vaults of the local museum, is an object so precious to the indigenous Kainai community.
02:38That before it can be revealed, it has to be blessed in a traditional ceremony.
02:44The object is something I've known about for years.
02:47But what I haven't realised until this moment is just what it means to the Kainai people.
02:52Because to carry out the ceremony that's needed for me as an outsider to view it, a teepee has been erected here.
02:59And elders from the tribe have gathered to carry out that ceremony.
03:05Because this object is a vital piece of their history, but it's also a piece of history of the British Empire.
03:14The object in question is known as the Great War Deeds of Mike Mountain Horse.
03:20Mike 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.
03:37The first world war.
03:39The first world war.
03:40The first world war.
03:44Each 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.
04:10Explosions.
04:11And death.
04:12Over 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.
04:38What 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.
05:02Millions of men got back from the Western Front, traumatized.
05:06Is the painting a form of therapy for someone like Mike Mountain Horse?
05:10Definitely.
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.
05:21You know, so it went from here to there.
05:23But the result is also something which is a piece of history.
05:27That's right.
05:28We 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.
05:40Because of course I'm not going through this.
05:42The Homelands of the Kainai people.
05:43The landscape Mike Mountain Horse knew lie four-and-a-half thousand miles from the battlefields of Europe.
05:51The homelands of the Kainai people.
05:55The landscape Mike Mountain Horse knew lie 4,500 miles from the battlefields of Europe.
06:04Part of the Canadian prairies, it is a land of vast plains and deep river valleys,
06:10home to the reserves and the settlements on which many Kainai people still live.
06:17This landscape could hardly be more different from the fields of France and Belgium where the Western Front stood.
06:25And Mike Mountain Horse found himself on the Western Front because he and his people were subjects of the British Empire.
06:33And in the early years of the 20th century, after more than 300 years of empire building,
06:40that meant that he was part of a vast global system that in all sorts of ways tied together over 400 million people.
06:51Almost one in four of everybody on the planet.
06:56And perhaps nothing gets across the scale and the reach and the diversity of that empire
07:04than the fact that people who lived in places as remote as this could find themselves transported across oceans
07:12to fight and to labour in the name of that empire.
07:16Mike Mountain Horse was one of 4,000 indigenous Canadians who fought in the name of the British Empire.
07:29And they were not alone.
07:32Volunteers from the Caribbean colonies rushed to join the British Army.
07:37Thousands of Africans were recruited to take the war to Germany's African Empire.
07:43And from India, over a million men were sent to the Western Front and the Middle East.
07:49With many Indians supporting the war in the hope that their loyalty would win them a greater voice in Indian politics.
07:59The First World War ended not only with victory for the forces of Britain and its empire,
08:05but with the last great expansion of that empire.
08:10Because it was in the years after the war, in the early 1920s,
08:15as Britain took over the colonies of the defeated powers,
08:18that the empire reached its maximum size.
08:22And yet, at that moment, as the Union flag was raised over new colonies,
08:28the empire was just one generation away from collapse.
08:33The 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.
08:57Because this was the site of perhaps the most flamboyant ceremony in the whole history of the British Empire.
09:07The Grand Durbar of King George V.
09:12200 Indian princes, along with the British officials and soldiers who administered the raj,
09:19and tens of thousands of guests, gathered here to offer obeisance to the king-emperor.
09:25This monument marks the exact spot from which the king surveyed the scene and gave a historic speech.
09:38At the very end of his speech, this British king informed the Indian people that the capital city of their country was to change.
09:47India 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.
09:57Modern 20th century India was to be ruled from Delhi.
10:02But this wasn't simply to be a transfer of power from one city to another.
10:08A new city, a new Delhi, was to be created.
10:12The Durbar of 1911 was part of a strategy that had been developed in the decades since the so-called Indian Mutiny.
10:25The British aimed to inspire loyalty among their Indian subjects by using spectacle and by co-opting Indian traditions.
10:35But the Durbar and the decision to move the capital also reflected a new imperial reality.
10:43Historian Swapna Liddle has written about New Delhi and about why it was built.
10:50What does it say about British power in India, this decision to create this new capital?
10:56The 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.
11:07And 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.
11:17Because this is the age of the rise of Indian nationalism.
11:20So there's a rethinking of the image of empire.
11:25And the idea was that we have to give in to some of the, shall we say, reasonable demands.
11:32But how do you make the British Raj more acceptable in Indian eyes?
11:37And the idea is Delhi, in order to reduce British Indian government's role to that of an imperial power, giving more autonomy to provinces.
11:49So it's a devolution.
11:50But under British control.
11:52Yes.
11:53And this is what brings us to why Delhi.
11:55Because then you are remaking the British Raj in the image of, shall we say, other Indian empires.
12:03It was the capital of the Mughals.
12:05It was the capital of earlier Sultanates before that.
12:08So it has that aura of power.
12:11The 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.
12:24So the planning of the city, for instance, this central vista, which came to be called King's Way, is exactly parallel to Chandanichok, the main ceremonial avenue of the Mughal city.
12:36And the use of red sandstone.
12:39This is the material of which a lot of the monumental imperial architecture in Delhi of earlier eras is also built.
12:47So you have the Red Fort, for instance.
12:49It's not easy to transport all of this here, but they think it worth their while to do this.
12:54The appeal of Delhi was that it had all of these associations with past great Indian empires, but all of those empires had fallen.
13:03So 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.
13:11It's interesting that all the objections to this program actually come from prominent conservative British voices.
13:18There are very few Indians who are against this. In fact, they are all for it.
13:23The Indians recognize it for the concession it is to Indian demands.
13:28Their strategy is, let's go to the next step now. Let's ask for more.
13:31So the symbolism, the taking of these motifs and designs from Mughal history, that's appreciated, but it's not enough.
13:39It's one step in a series of demands.
13:41Absolutely. The British seem surprised by it, but really they shouldn't have been because British responses never kept up with what Indians would demand.
13:53And this is an inexorable march towards independence.
13:58Because it looks so monumental. It's hard to think about this was an act of justifying British rule.
14:04It is very much about saying that we can be a new and improved Raj.
14:09The new capital for the new phase of British imperial rule in India took 20 years to build.
14:2050 miles of roads were cut across a city of parliaments, ministries, homes and shops that covered 62 square miles.
14:30The final cost was over ten and a half million pounds. Almost a billion pounds in today's money.
14:40The official opening of New Delhi took place two decades after the plan to move the capital from Calcutta had first been announced.
14:49The building of this city, the building of all of this, that had been achieved at colossal expense.
14:56This city was regarded as such a priority that work continued even through the darkest years of the First World War.
15:04But the year in which that grand inauguration ceremony took place, that was 1931.
15:11Just eight years before the outbreak of a Second World War.
15:20When 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,
15:32when India's ruling elite had embraced the outbreak of that war as a chance to win concessions.
15:41In 1939, the coming of war intensified the growing campaign for an end to British rule,
15:47a reality that was concealed behind the wartime propaganda.
15:53This poster was produced in 1941 by the Ministry of Information, Britain's wartime propaganda ministry.
16:03And it projects the image that the government wanted to project.
16:07Under a fluttering Union flag are men representing the armed forces of Britain.
16:13In the front row is a British sailor, an Australian soldier and a Canadian airman.
16:19Behind them are soldiers from Britain and New Zealand.
16:23At the back is an Indian soldier.
16:26And the positioning of these men reflects the racial hierarchies of the British Empire.
16:32Because India's contribution in terms of soldiers was by far the greatest of any of the colonies.
16:38By 1945, the Indian army was two and a half million strong.
16:43Only at the very back, up in the corner, do we have a depiction of an African soldier.
16:49But looking at this poster here in India, underneath a memorial to Indian soldiers who died in the First World War,
16:58what is most striking is that this image bears almost no relation to reality.
17:04Because the war years here in India were not years of togetherness.
17:09They were years of mass political protest, years of British political oppression.
17:16And the years of a catastrophic famine in Bengal in which around three million Indians died.
17:23And 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.
17:33And that Britain, economically, militarily and politically, was just too weak to resist those demands.
17:40In 1946, the British government accepted the inevitable and the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, was dispatched to India.
17:53He was tasked with plotting a path to independence, which by then, it had become clear, meant partition.
18:01And fearful that India could slide into a form of civil war, independence and partition were rushed.
18:09When Independence Day came in 1947, two nations emerged and two independence ceremonies were held.
18:18One in Lahore in Pakistan, the other in the Parliament of New Delhi,
18:25the city from which the British had imagined that they would continue to rule over India.
18:31On the eve of independence, seven out of every ten subjects of the British Empire were Indian.
18:44At the stroke of midnight, those 400 million people became citizens of independent India or Pakistan.
18:54For two centuries, India had been an economic and military engine that had kept the whole system of empire working.
19:01It was in India that the British really learned how to be imperialists.
19:06India's economy had been tethered to the needs of Britain.
19:10And the Indian taxpayers had paid not just for their own colonisation, but for the development and the defence of other parts of the empire.
19:19And Indians themselves had been shipped right across the British Empire to grow sugarcane in the Caribbean and to build the railways in East Africa.
19:29India's people, India's economy had been key to making the British Empire possible.
19:36And then in 1947, with Britain exhausted and virtually bankrupt after five years of war, this whole system suddenly came to a violent end.
19:48The legacies of that moment of partition and of the violence that accompanied it are part of the family histories of millions of people.
20:03It was chaos. It was absolute chaos.
20:06It was one of the largest mass migrations in human history.
20:0915 million people displaced. So many deaths.
20:13The judge who was tasked with spitting India and Pakistan was only given five weeks.
20:20Our family would have had land in Sindh and our home was in Jalandhar, in Punjab, in India.
20:26And in 1947, when the partition happened, Sindh fell into Pakistan and Jalandhar fell into India.
20:34And my great-grandparents were in Sindh at the time.
20:38What eventually transpired was my great-grandmother jumped into a well to save herself from either being abducted or raped.
20:50And my great-grandad died fighting, trying to protect himself and his family.
20:57They also had their daughter with them, my great-aunt, who also took her own life.
21:02And my grandad would have been a ten-year-old waiting in Jalandhar for his parents to come home.
21:10Despite the loss of India, Britain, after the Second World War, still ruled over tens of millions of people.
21:29Scattered over dozens of colonies and protectorates and in the self-governing dominions like Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
21:39But in the aftermath of the Second World War, Britain faced a crisis at home.
21:46Shortages of basic foods like milk, eggs and cheese were worse after 1945 than they had been during the war years.
21:56And rationing continued into the mid-1950s.
22:00The nation that had been the world's banker now had debts of £3.5 billion and was dependent upon loans from the United States.
22:13To generate income to pay off those vast debts and produce food for a British population desperate for better times, politicians turned their attention to the most neglected part of what was left of the empire.
22:28Africa.
22:33In the late 1940s, thousands of agriculturalists, climatologists and engineers were sent to Africa to launch an agricultural revolution.
22:43Africa.
22:46The most grandiose of the investments in Africa was focused on Kenya and Tanganyika, modern Tanzania.
22:55It was a vast scheme to grow groundnuts, peanuts that could be crushed for cooking oil.
23:02One of the everyday essentials in desperately short supply back in Britain.
23:09The whole scheme was built on the belief that modern machinery, heavy tractors and bulldozers, would simply be able to sweep away the vegetation here in East Africa.
23:21And then, when the land was cleared, crops could be planted and harvested again using the latest machinery.
23:29But the tractors imported into East Africa from America had been designed for the prairies of the American Midwest.
23:38They weren't strong enough.
23:40They just weren't resilient enough to take on this sort of dense African bushland.
23:46And so, there weren't enough spare parts.
23:49There wasn't enough space in the workshops to repair machines.
23:53There wasn't even enough diesel.
23:55And so, despite all of the ambition and all of the money thrown into it, the groundnut scheme very rapidly began to fall behind schedule and go over budget.
24:06The generation of experts and civil servants who were sent to Africa were almost all veterans of the Second World War.
24:18And they were proud of Britain's wartime tradition of overcoming obstacles by improvising.
24:25And so, when it became clear that the machines brought to Africa were not up to the task, they again improvised.
24:33580 Sherman tanks left over from the war were purchased.
24:40And the engineers at the Vickers factory in Newcastle removed the guns and the armour and converted Sherman tanks into heavy bulldozers known as Sherviks.
24:52Yet, even these Sherviks, each of them weighing 18 tonnes, were not capable of clearing the land at the speed envisaged in the original plans.
25:05And across some of the areas identified for groundnut cultivation, the British planners encountered another enemy.
25:13The Baobab tree.
25:18The teams that were sent out to clear the land for the groundnuts discovered that even converted Second World War tanks couldn't topple Baobab trees.
25:29There were reports of machines charging at the trunks of these trees at full speed and just bouncing off.
25:37And even when Baobab trees were cut down, it was almost impossible to remove their huge, bulbous roots from the soil.
25:46And there is something ironic about this vast investment in the African Empire being stopped literally in its tracks by these trees.
25:56Because Baobabs are not just enormous, they're also ancient.
26:01These trees can live for over 2,000 years, which means some of the Baobabs that stood in the way of the groundnut scheme in the middle years of the 20th century had been standing back in the first years of the 17th century,
26:18when the first English ship set sail to establish the first English colonies.
26:24These trees were older than the British Empire.
26:31These ancient trees and this ancient landscape, in the end, defeated the economic planners of post-war Britain.
26:43In 1951, the government finally cancelled the groundnut scheme, an imperial fantasy that had wasted £36 million, a billion pounds in today's money.
26:57Britain's attempt to use its African colonies to solve its domestic problems had been a failure.
27:10Post-war Britain was not just blighted by shortages and burdened with debts.
27:15It was also devastated by years of bombing.
27:18The damage was so extensive that it was visible from the air.
27:25Just after the war, the aerial reconnaissance planes of the Royal Air Force, that had been used to find targets in Germany during the war, were deployed for a very different purpose.
27:37What the RAF produced was a huge aerial survey of the nation, a photographic doomsday book of Britain after six years of war.
27:49These are the docks of Liverpool.
27:52This is what is left of the centre of Bristol.
27:56And this is the devastation around St. Paul's Cathedral.
28:02The scale of the damage was enormous.
28:05The whole nation was in desperate need of reconstruction and modernisation.
28:10To rebuild the country, it was estimated that 1.3 million additional workers were needed.
28:23And one way the government set about finding them was by encouraging immigration.
28:28Between the late 40s and the 1960s, hundreds of thousands came from Ireland.
28:34Thousands more from the displaced persons camps of Eastern Europe.
28:39And this place, Tilbury Docks, is famous today as the port into which one ship arrived.
28:46The Windrush, carrying hundreds of workers who had come to Britain from the Caribbean, Britain's oldest colonies.
28:58The passenger list of the Empire Windrush that arrived here at Tilbury on the 21st of June 1948
29:07has become a rather famous document in British history.
29:11And if we look in this column that describes the profession, occupation or calling of the passengers,
29:18we can see that many of the people coming to Britain on the Windrush to begin new lives have exactly the skills that post-war Britain desperately needed.
29:28So there's a gentleman here from British Guyana who is an engineer.
29:34On the following page, there's a long list of people arriving from Bermuda.
29:39And among them is a boilermaker. Here is an electrician.
29:43And there is, of course, a story to be told about these people, about their contribution, about the obstacles and the racism that they faced in post-war Britain.
29:54But there's another story about movement and about migration around the British Empire that we talk about a bit less.
30:03And that story can also be told through the stories of the ships that come here to Tilbury docks and the passengers who came through these arrival halls.
30:13This is another passenger list for another ship, the Malloyer.
30:19And that was here at Tilbury on the 10th of June 1948, so 11 days before the Windrush arrived.
30:28And this, again, is a long list of passengers.
30:32But these people are not coming to Britain to start new lives.
30:37These people are emigrants. These are people leaving Britain.
30:42And they're headed to what this form describes as their country of intended future permanent residence.
30:50Which, in the case of all of these people, is either Australia or it's New Zealand.
30:56And let's look at that same column, profession, occupation or calling of the passengers.
31:02And here we have a truck driver, a factory worker, a labourer.
31:07There's a woman here called Margaret Black.
31:10She's heading off for a new life in Australia.
31:12And under profession or occupation, she's listed as a hospital worker.
31:17And the timing here is what is critical.
31:19The Malloyer leaves Tilbury docks exactly 25 days before the new National Health Service opens its doors for the first time.
31:29And the first crisis faced by the NHS is a lack of hospital workers and nurses.
31:36And there are thousands of other nurses, thousands of other people with critical skills who leave on thousands of other ships in the years after 1945.
31:48Ever since the 17th century, the colonies had been places to which British people had travelled in the hope of transforming their fortunes.
32:02But the last great wave of imperial emigration was unlike all those that had preceded it.
32:09Emigration had always been part of the story of the British Empire.
32:14But the emigration that takes place after the Second World War takes place in a very different context.
32:19Absolutely. In the 1920s, the British wanted to get people to emigrate to the Empire.
32:24There was high unemployment and there was a worry about overpopulation.
32:28After the Second World War, the story is radically different.
32:31There's a shortage of labour and actually a worry about population decrease.
32:35Nevertheless, emigration is back on the agenda.
32:38People want to go and the government wants to encourage people to go to the so-called white dominions.
32:44So this is Australia, New Zealand, Canada?
32:46Exactly.
32:47The old settler colonies?
32:48The old settler colonies, which were sometimes called the British Commonwealth of Nations, including the United Kingdom itself.
32:55When you read newspaper reports and look at newsreels from the time, there was genuine excitement among millions of people about the prospect of starting a new life in the Dominion.
33:05People were looking forward to a higher standard of living, a more sun, beaches, no rationing.
33:10All these things were very much part of the propaganda.
33:13And yet, even though they are desperately in need of every labourer, every worker, every skilled worker that they can keep,
33:21British governments not just encourage, they even subsidise emigration.
33:27They subsidise emigration.
33:29They want to maintain the British Empire as a world power.
33:34And it's been pulled apart as a world power because the United States is so strong.
33:37So Canada is getting closer to the United States, so are Australia and New Zealand.
33:42So the British government wants to send more British people, British stock is the phrase, to populate these places so that they remain in some sense within the British orbit.
33:53They're worried that if, as actually happens, the Australians bring in displaced persons from Greece and from Italy, that Britishness will be diluted.
34:01So we have an extraordinary situation where the United Kingdom is exporting people.
34:06I mean, over a million people go in the late 40s and 1950s.
34:10In a country of less than 50 million.
34:12Yeah.
34:13That's a very considerable number of people.
34:14It is.
34:15Immigration into the UK is much lower than emigration.
34:20So the idea that we have that post-war Britain is a country of immigration from former empire is actually misleading.
34:29Because it's small numbers, particularly in the 14s.
34:32It's small numbers.
34:33It's very small numbers.
34:34We're very aware that immigration from the Caribbean and from India is going to change Britain.
34:40But it's far more people come from Ireland.
34:42Far more people come from Ireland and more people from continental Europe, actually, than from the Caribbean or from India.
34:49And it's also important to note that the British government, like the Australian government, the Canadian government, want to keep the country white.
34:56And that's central to the politics.
34:57So the immigration from the Caribbean and India is absolutely not encouraged.
35:02They only want Europeans or British stock to come to their country.
35:07So it's a profoundly racist understanding that's at work here.
35:12And this is one of the big stories of the British Empire, one of the most forgotten stories, that it was an empire of emigration.
35:17It's one of these remarkable cases where really, really important facets of our history are not common knowledge.
35:29By 1952, around half a million people had left Britain for the Commonwealth.
35:35But that year came to be remembered as the start of a new age.
35:41One that began not in Britain, but in one of Britain's African colonies.
35:48This is Treetops, a safari lodge in Kenya.
35:52On the 6th of February, 1952, the then Princess Elizabeth was here when her father, George VI, died and she became queen.
36:06Here in Kenya, Princess Elizabeth became queen not just of the United Kingdom, but of what, in the early 50s, even after Indian independence, remained an enormous empire.
36:19And so, at the beginning of the second Elizabethan age, there was still the view within Britain's governing classes,
36:26that despite the setbacks, despite the country's precarious finances,
36:31that the Commonwealth could still guarantee a degree of global influence,
36:36and that there were parts of the empire, certain colonies in which British rule could continue in some form for decades,
36:44perhaps even for another generation.
36:49But the second Elizabethan age was not to be a new chapter in the history of the British Empire,
36:58but an age of decolonisation.
37:01In Africa and the Caribbean, demands for independence became irresistible.
37:07And in 1956, after independent Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal, the limits of British power were exposed,
37:16when the United States forced Britain and her allies to withdraw after an invasion.
37:22With Britain's position in the world fatally undermined.
37:28The late 50s and the 1960s saw members of the British royal family become participants in a familiar ritual.
37:37At stadiums and racecourses across the world, crowds were gathered, political leaders assembled.
37:45The Union flag was lowered and the new flags of new independent nations raised.
37:52The apparent ease with which the British negotiated the peaceful surrender of the empire they had spent centuries building,
38:01was presented as one of the empire's last great achievements.
38:05The transition from empire to Commonwealth was portrayed almost as a miracle.
38:18And while there were many colonies in which British rule was peacefully dismantled,
38:23this was often not the case where white settlers had arrived in large numbers and taken control of the land.
38:32Which was exactly the state of affairs in the colony in which the Second Elizabethan Age had begun.
38:41Over there is the Treetops Hotel that tourists from Britain have been visiting for decades
38:47to see the place where Princess Elizabeth became Queen Elizabeth.
38:51But that, that is not the original building.
38:56The original Treetops stood about here, where I am now.
39:01And the reason that it's not here now is because it was destroyed.
39:05It was burnt down just two years after the Queen had visited.
39:10It was a victim in a rebellion that broke out within months of the Queen's visit.
39:16The fertile highlands of Kenya had been identified as being suitable for white settlement back in the last years of the 19th century.
39:28And after both world wars, British veterans had been encouraged to settle here.
39:33By the 1950s, around 30,000 white farmers owned 12,000 square miles of the best land in Kenya.
39:43The Kukuyu, a people of over a million, owned just 2,000 square miles.
39:50Among the land taken from the Kukuyu was the land upon which the Treetops Lodge had been built.
40:00In 1952, when Queen Elizabeth was at Treetops, a movement was gaining support among the Kukuyu that aimed to recover their land and end British rule in Kenya.
40:12That movement was called the Land and Freedom Army.
40:19It was also known as Mau Mau.
40:22Although the vast majority of the people killed in the Mau Mau conflict were Africans, the killings of white settlers shocked the British authorities into action.
40:34Their response was a huge military deployment.
40:38Thousands of soldiers were sent to Kenya from Britain and from other African colonies.
40:44And the bombers of the RAF were used to bomb Mau Mau positions in the forests.
40:51But the British also set up camps in which hundreds of thousands of Kenyans were imprisoned, processed and interrogated.
41:03Today, in the 21st century, memories of what happened in those camps have returned to haunt both Kenya and Britain.
41:14In the countryside, 50 miles to the north of Nairobi, lies Mweru High School for Boys.
41:27But these buildings have been repurposed,
41:30because Mweru was not designed or built to be a school.
41:35These buildings were built back in the 1950s.
41:39And in recent years, Kenyan historians have gone back to the archives,
41:44back to old maps and official British documents,
41:47to recover the story of what happened here and in places like it.
41:52Anthony Mayuna is one of those Kenyan historians,
41:57and his work has helped uncover what happened when Mweru was in internment camp
42:03and British colonial forces were based here.
42:06This building was a barracks, maintained with a hot shower, electricity and all that.
42:13So soldiers, this is where they live?
42:15Yes. There's a swimming pool nearby.
42:17There's a swimming pool?
42:18Yeah. In every camp there was a swimming pool for the British officers.
42:21Where others are suffering, others are swimming.
42:23They used to also have a hangman.
42:27Was there a gallows in this camp?
42:30Yes. People were being hanged during the night.
42:33So it was not shown in the public.
42:35So the hangman would get up in the middle of the night?
42:37Yes. And people would be hanged?
42:39People who had been convicted to hang would be hanged.
42:42And then buried in unmarked graves.
42:44There must be graves just within the compound.
42:46Because so many people died here?
42:47Yeah.
42:48And have the children at this school taught what happened here?
42:51They know. In fact, they know.
42:53Those soldiers and that hangman may have been the people who killed their ancestors?
42:58Yes. But I think those people who were Maumau were very much traumatised.
43:06They don't speak so much about what happened.
43:10So you have this age where people don't want to talk about places like this?
43:13Exactly.
43:15At no other time in the history of the Empire did the British authorities use the death penalty
43:22as regularly as they did in Kenya in the middle years of the 20th century.
43:281,090 Kenyans were hanged during the Maumau emergency.
43:35But Mweru's school contains relics of other horrors.
43:40This room is a torture room, both physical and mental.
43:45A person was put here, removed from another detainee.
43:48And put into solitary confinement.
43:50Exactly.
43:51For you to confess, water was poured.
43:54The prison guards would fill the floor with water.
43:57And you have nowhere to sleep.
43:58So you have to start to leave this place.
44:00Left in the place being made almost crippled.
44:05I can assure you, many of the detainees were castrated in this room.
44:11Castration.
44:12In this room?
44:13Yeah, I met survivors.
44:14In fact, I counted about three of them.
44:16How was that done?
44:17Pliers.
44:18With pliers?
44:19Yes.
44:20Oh, God.
44:21This one.
44:22Those who could not survive died.
44:25And their next of kin could not be informed because it was something the colonial government
44:31wanted to hide about.
44:32In fact, I was told that there were more than 20 such cells within Mweru.
44:41I've been to the sites of former detention camps and former concentration camps all over the
44:47world, but I've never been to somewhere like this.
44:50A former camp in which people were abused and tortured that isn't a museum or a heritage
44:57site, but that is a working school.
45:00And that decision to reclaim this history and to repurpose this site is one that's been
45:06taken very purposefully and very deliberately by many people in Kenya who were determined
45:12that this terrible chapter in Kenyan history not be forgotten.
45:20Back in the 1950s, when news broke of what was happening in places like this, there was
45:26an outcry in Britain.
45:29It was the killing of 11 Mau Mau detainees in another camp, a place called Holla, that led
45:36to the shutting down of the camps.
45:39By 1960, the Mau Mau rebellion had been defeated.
45:43And yet, to keep control, the British had been forced to make huge political concessions.
45:49Concessions that led, in 1963, to Kenyan independence.
45:55But in the months before the dignitaries and the crowds gathered for the independence
45:59ceremony in Nairobi, the British authorities had set out to control how the history of the
46:06British Empire in Kenya would be remembered.
46:11And in the last weeks of 1963, planes left Nairobi carrying crates of documents,
46:18just as documents had been removed in the final days of British rule in other colonies.
46:26Historian Riley Linebar has studied what happened in the archives of Britain's last colonies
46:32in the last years of empire.
46:35This document is from 1961, and it's to be distributed, it says, among government officials
46:42in Nairobi, in Kenya. And it is very strikingly marked with a big letter W. What does that mean?
46:51The W stands for WATCH. It's a part of a new record-keeping system that this memorandum is describing.
46:581961, Kenya's constitutional independence is being negotiated.
47:02We're about two years away from independence itself.
47:04Two years away from independence.
47:06What the W here indicates is for any person handling this document, they know this is a secret.
47:13It should not be available for anyone to see unless deemed an authorized officer.
47:19Does it give us the criteria?
47:20It does. There's four criteria.
47:22A. Prejudice the security of the Commonwealth or of any friendly state.
47:28Or B. Embarrass Her Majesty's Government.
47:31Or C. Give a political party in power an unfair or improper advantage.
47:38Or D. Endangerous source of intelligence or render any individual vulnerable to victimization.
47:44Now, some of those criteria are entirely reasonable.
47:47Intelligence, the safety of people whose names appear in the documents.
47:51But point B about embarrassing the government, that's not about security.
47:57No, it's not clear what it's about.
48:01And so it provides those interpreting this memorandum a wide remit to decide for themselves what would be embarrassing or not.
48:09When a document has been stamped with a W, what becomes of it?
48:14Either it's slated to be removed to London or, as the document itself will tell us, it will be destroyed.
48:23Destruction.
48:24Some of the documents that received the W stamp were burnt or drowned in open water.
48:30This reveals how committed not only the colonial administration in Kenya was,
48:36but the colonial office in London to keeping secret evidence of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya.
48:43So in this case, what they mean by might embarrass the government, they mean evidence of torture, of murder,
48:49of camps in which people were held for years?
48:52Correct.
48:53And all of this is being done in secret. It says secret at the top of each page of this document.
48:58It's all being done as a self-conscious act of secrecy.
49:02If we come here to point 15, indeed, the very existence of the Watch series should never be revealed.
49:09And to the same end, the name Legacy should not be used in a non-designated context.
49:14That title, Operation Legacy, that's fairytelling.
49:20There's a fear precisely of sort of an African reinterpretation of the history of the British Empire.
49:26How widespread is Operation Legacy?
49:30It's empire-wide. So this is a project of secret keeping that is not limited to the transition to independence.
49:37And in fact, the project of record removal continued through the mid-1990s.
49:43One legacy of Operation Legacy is that it's enabled people even today to convince themselves that the British Empire
49:53was unique among all empires, in which it didn't have these crimes, these blemishes, these terrible incidents,
49:59these racism, all the things that are destroyed in the documents that are spirited away.
50:04It allows a sort of maintenance of a form of innocence.
50:08A form of innocence. And also, it has allowed a certain mythology and ignorance over the fact and reality of empire within the UK itself.
50:20The destruction of documents in Operation Legacy allowed certain parts of the history of empire to be forgotten.
50:28But that is not unique.
50:30After slavery was abolished, that history was slowly airbrushed out of the story of empire.
50:40The slave fortresses on the African coast were abandoned to the forests.
50:46The burial grounds on the plantations forgotten.
50:50The Australian families, descended from convicts, concealed their family histories.
50:57And some of the dynasties, grown rich from wealth acquired through the East India Company or in the West Indies, brushed those family stories under the carpet.
51:10One of the reasons this history is today re-emerging is because of another story fundamental to the British Empire. Immigration.
51:23After the Second World War, just as the empire itself was falling apart, the peoples of the empire, despite official disencouragement, began to settle in Britain in large numbers and become part of British society.
51:38I think as I've gotten older, I've begun to see that Britishness takes influence from so many parts of the world and so many different communities have come to the UK and have brought bits of their culture, bits of vibrance to this country.
51:56People are kind of fed up of the story of the empire being a monologue, told mainly by people who look and sound like me, frankly.
52:03There is a crisis in identity in Britain, and I think partly that is because we have not had a grown-up conversation about our history.
52:11Immigration from the former empire has created new hybrid forms of British identity, which in turn have led to calls for a new, more inclusive version of British history.
52:24The fact that I've grown up here has meant that I do have this hybrid identity, and therefore I'm not, you know, afraid to talk about Britain in a light that perhaps is not positive all the time.
52:36There's a mistake with patriotism, which means that you must always speak about Britain in a positive light, but that's just not the case because we need to look at British history as a whole.
52:45It is the reason why I have so much of the culture that I have today. It's the reason why I listen to soca music and I eat Caribbean foods, and the mosque that I grew up in is an Indo-Caribbean mosque, and every Saturday that was my experience.
53:01And yet there is still the view among some that the history of empire is better off forgotten, or that the uncovering of this history is intended to make people feel guilty about events that took place before their birth.
53:17Learning the history hasn't made me hate Britain. The money that was created through slavery and empire, that's the money that I benefit from today, and the fact that that money was made from my ancestors, their dehumanisation, exploitation, that is really complex.
53:34I've been on this journey to just discover my roots through London, because the Raj, the East India Company, events in World War One, World War Two, all of that is the reason I'm here in London, and that's my story.
53:50As a historian, my attempts to make sense of my own hybrid identity takes me inevitably to the past, and to two sets of documents, both held here at the National Archives.
54:03Together, those documents very personally reveal just how deep the history of empire runs.
54:13The first set of documents are the official records of a tiny event in the story of the British Empire, an attack by British forces on a small African city in the year 1892.
54:28This map shows the route that the British forces took as they marched towards their target, and each of these symbols of a crossed sword, that is a small battle, an engagement that they had with the local African people.
54:43And right at the top of the map is their destination, their target, the town of Jebu Ode.
54:52Now that is the modern Nigerian town of Jebu Ode.
54:56Here is a map of the town with its defensive walls and its defensive ditch.
55:03Also among these documents is this list of the weapons and the ammunition that the British forces took with them on this raid.
55:13There is seven-pounder guns, that's artillery, with 100 rounds.
55:18There are Nordenfeld guns, rapid-firing guns with multiple barrels, and there is a Maxim gun.
55:25And in 1892, this is just about the most high-tech weapon on earth.
55:31And we know that these weapons were used with devastating effect because we have this account by one of the British officers.
55:40He says, nearly all the principal chiefs had been killed or wounded, and that there was not a household in Jebu Ode that did not mourn the loss of at least one of its members.
55:52Now, I've stood here in the archives many times and I've looked at documents and maps just like these because there are many small wars and punitive raids in the history of the British Empire.
56:06But these documents, to me, are a bit different because this town, Jebu Ode, is where the Nigerian half of my family come from.
56:18And when I look at this list of weapons, these were weapons that were used against people that I'm descended from.
56:28But there are other documents right here in the National Archives that really complicate the picture.
56:36This is the discharge papers of another of my ancestors. His name was David Ewart, and he was a Scottish soldier in the British Army.
56:50He fought in a regiment called the 78th Regiment of Foot, and that was a regiment that was sent to fight in India.
56:58This letter explains what their task was. It says that their job was to defend territory recently acquired by His Majesty's and the East India Company's arms in various parts of India.
57:13It was the private East India Company, not the British states that paid David Ewart his army wages.
57:22And what all of this means is that I'm descended from a British colonial soldier and from Africans who were attacked by British colonial soldiers.
57:34And this complexity, this messiness, that is just a feature of the history of empire.
57:41A history that just can't be understood through ideas of pride and shame, of them and us.
57:49And it's a history that we share with literally billions of people across the world.
57:54And whether we like it or not, whether we're comfortable with it or not, this is a history that runs too deep and matters too much for it to be brushed aside or wished away.
58:10Things are never as black and white as we think they are.
58:13And history is important. And I think people get really scared or upset that we're trying to take that away.
58:22When has ever knowing the truth about yourself and confronting your past, when has that ever been something that isn't beneficial to you?
58:32All we have are links and stories of each other.
58:36I don't think it's possible to think of empire and beyond that in any other way.
58:43Watch my exclusive interview to discover how we made this series.
58:50Head to bbc.co.uk forward slash empire and follow the links to the Open University.
58:58But we will never show fear, even in my eyes.
59:08I will always rise in wildfires.
59:17I ain't never been scared, even through my tears.
59:24I will always care.
59:28I will always care.
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