![]() ![]() ![]() It was too hot to sleep and we spent the night in talking. Every Anglo-Indian is haunted by a sense of guilt which he usually conceals as best he can.” He spoke of “the wretched prisoners squatting in the reeking cages of the lock-ups…the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos, the women and children howling when their menfolk were led away.” On an overnight train in Burma, Orwell found himself with another colonial officer “I was in the Indian Police five years,” wrote George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier, “and by the end of that time I hated the imperialism I was serving…. ![]() ![]() The empire’s foot soldiers had fewer illusions. Surely those civilized Brits did not turn their African or Asian subjects into forced laborers, as the Belgians did in the Congo, or wage genocidal warfare, as the Kaiser’s Germany did in what is today Namibia. In the heyday of colonialism decades ago, when the British Empire controlled so much of the world, it was tempting to think of it as more benign than its rivals. British guards and suspected Mau Mau rebels, Central Province, Kenya, 1954 ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |