Reckoning with the past: truth-telling and the British Empire
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Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.

Good afternoon everybody. We've lost some of the sun but I hope you'll agree it's a lovely day to talk about empire. So welcome, thank you for being here at LSE. Today's event forms part of the LSE Festival Visions for the Future. This series of events explores the threats and opportunities of the near and distant future and what a better world could look like which is really what we're focusing on today. So my name is Asher Hurtin-Crabb and I'll be the chair for today.

I'm a postdoctoral fellow in the LSE Department of International Relations and my research covers international trade, health policy, gender inequality and I specifically look at how legacies of Western European imperialism continue to shape policy making and its outcomes.

which is why I'm delighted to have you here today for this event, Reckoning with the Past, Truth-telling and the British Empire, where we'll explore, in part, the vision for a People's International Truth-telling Commission on the British Empire, a platform to uncover historical injustices, amplify voices silenced by colonial histories, and challenge enduring inequalities.

We'll be looking at why we need to reckon with the complex and painful legacies of the British Empire, but also how. What would it mean to create an international truth-telling commission, and why is this conversation so urgent today?

So I'm really excited to have such a wonderful panel here today. We've got three excellent speakers. Dr. Irma Mouran to my right is an associate professor of international history here at the LSE. She specializes in histories of colonialism, racism, women and political thought in the Caribbean, Britain and the US in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Kofi Klu is an independent Pan-African scholar activist, community advocate and educationist specializing in Pan-African community law and global citizenship education. He is the chief executive commissioner of Panafrimdaba, a grassroots Pan-African community advocacy research and think tank organization and also one of the founders of the UK African reparations movement.

And finally, in the middle, we have Senator Lydia Thorpe, Gunai, Gwijit Mara and Jaburung mother, grandmother and advocate for First Peoples. She is an independent senator for the state of Victoria in Australia and represents the Black Sovereign Movement. So before we get started, just a little housekeeping for anyone using social media. The hashtag for today's event is hashtag LSE Festival up there.

I would ask you to please put your phones on silent so as not to disrupt the event. And the event is being recorded and will be made available as a podcast subject to technical difficulties. Following the panel discussion, we'll open up to questions and answers from the floor and from online. And if you could just wait until a microphone reaches you and let us know your name and affiliation. Okay, without further ado, please welcome Dr. Imabong Umoran.

Thank you. Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for being here. Thank you to Asha for inviting me to speak. I'm really honoured to be here among such distinguished people. So yeah, thank you. I thought I would take the time that I have to basically share some of my research, which I think helps to kind of address some of these issues about truth-telling and how we reckon with the past of the British Empire.

So as Asher said, I'm a historian here at the LSE and my work principally focuses on the Caribbean.

and in particular the entangled legacies of colonialism in the Caribbean as well as in the Caribbean's multiple and many diasporas, Britain being one of them. And I've just finished a book called Empire Without End, A New History of Britain and the Caribbean, which really tries to grapple with the complexities of the kind of past in the present.

And by that, what I mean is the ways in which the history of the British Empire has not ended, that its legacies lingers very much on both in Britain and the Caribbean. And that's because of the really deep entangled histories that Britain and the Caribbean have. So the book really focuses on the English speaking, so the Anglophone Caribbean. And I try to stress how the violence

that were central to the British Empire has played a really critical role in the contemporary Caribbean and that we can't really understand linked inequality today in Britain that are raced, that are classed, without thinking about the legacies of the British Empire. Hence the title of the book, Empire Without End.

So it's really important, I think, at the outset to stress the significance of history when it comes to truth telling, right? That in different parts of the world where the British Empire touched different peoples in different places, history plays such a critical and vital role in

basically trying to stress through looking at different sources, by bringing different voices from the archives, the reality of what empire looked like, in particular the reality of what empire looked like for those at the bottom of society in the places where the British Empire touched.

And so the book really starts in the 1400s. It looks at the ways in which British contact with indigenous peoples in the Caribbean really set the stage for destruction, for violence that kind of brought large throughout the Caribbean.

The book then moves on to look at the kind of societies that existed in the Anglophone Caribbean during the period of racial slavery. And in particular, I use a term which is called the racial caste hierarchy to describe the society that existed during this period, so the kind of 17th, 18th, 19th centuries.

And I use this term because it helps to kind of centre both the race, but also the ways in which the construction of race, which is central to transatlantic slavery, how the construction of race stood alongside and was linked to other inequalities based on status, based on gender, based on class.

And the book kind of traces how this racial caste hierarchy that was kind of born in the Caribbean spread throughout the Caribbean, but also impacted the incredible rise of anti-black racism in Britain and that arguably still exists today.

As the book continues, I trace the ways in which the British Empire, and in particular its links and its centrality of white supremacy to the British Empire, impacted different peoples in the Caribbean. I try to make the case that understanding the history of the British Empire in the Caribbean is not simply a black versus white history, but it's a really much more multifaceted and complex one when we think about gender, when we think about the experiences of enslaved women,

when we think about the experiences of white poor people in the Caribbean and how they were entangled in the project of empire.

What I try to do in the book is I try to make more complex our understandings of the British Empire, which can oftentimes be very simplistic, narrow-minded, based a lot on myth rather than actual primary sources. I try to make much more complex the legacies of the British Empire by unearthing voices from the archives that are usually silenced, in particular women's stories, but also the stories of African Caribbean people who are really the kind of protagonists in the book.

And as a result of doing that, I do hope in the book that I try and tell a different history of empire, in particular when it comes to thinking about African Caribbean people. So African Caribbean people, in particular those who are middle class, really invested themselves in what they thought was the kind of benefits of empire, right? This idea that empire was benevolent.

that it was a grouping that would include them rather than exclude them, one that was built on brotherhood, one that was built on meritocracy. But I

as the years progress, as the book charts, for instance, the experiences of African Caribbean people during the First and Second World Wars, their experiences of migration to Britain, many begin to obviously realise that this idea of empire that many of them had been schooled in was simply not true, right? That racism stalked their lives, it impacted their employment, it impacted who they could love, what kind of places they could go to school, where they could live, it impacted nearly every facet of their lives.

And I tried to show how African Caribbean people responded to this in different ways. Some became really radical anti-racist activists.

others try to challenge the British Empire in much more moderate tones but I also through doing this try and again as I said tell a much more complex history of empire there were some that were really invested in the idea of empire as something that was good and moral but many of them came across the reality of empire which was one that was built on as I said violence and racism

So as the book kind of follows, as the book traces this chronological period, when we get to the 20th century and in particular when we get to the 1980s, what I show in the book is how the legacies of the British Empire really impact the role of the state and state racism when it comes to immigration policies in the 1970s and 80s. In particular, immigration policies that we, as we now know, have really impacted the kind of Windrush scandal.

So I stress how you really, again, can't understand Windrush without thinking about the much, much, much longer history of the Empire and also the role of the British state in its immigration policies and how much that was so much entangled with ideas of Empire, ideas of racism and discrimination, and that are still having such a really real vivid impact on the everyday lives of citizens today.

I end the book by thinking about, okay, so if this is the history, how do we really grapple with it? How do we think about what the future will look like? Because the future has to look different. I don't think, or I hope, I pray that racism isn't something that's going to exist forever. So how do we redress? How do we grasp this kind of truth-telling aspect of this history? And one of the things I talk about in the end of the book is the significance of reparations.

There's a real momentum that reparations has at the moment. I talk and I stress that reparations is not something new, it's something that's been going on for a very long time. Enslaved people themselves were asking for reparations during the period of slavery.

But in our kind of current discourse, political discourse, reparations and the movement reparations in the context of the Caribbean in particular has gathered a lot of political attention. Politicians are talking about it more, demanding it more. And I definitely think that reparations is one of the ways in which this aspect of truth telling, this idea of trying to reckon with the past can be done.

As a historian, I don't know all the answers about how reparations would look like, but I certainly think it's one of the most important movements that we have at the moment that attempts to reckon with the really difficult and violent history of the British Empire, which lingers long in our present. So I'm going to end there and hand over to my other speakers and colleagues. Thank you. Thank you.

And Imamong's fantastic book will actually be available downstairs later after this event. Thank you so much, Dr. Moran. Next up, we have Kofi Klute. Take it away, Kofi. Yeah, just following that, it's important to note, particularly from our African perspective, that empire, particularly the British Empire, is not something in the past. It is very much in our present.

And it is kind of veiled in the still very open, quite imperialist talk about global Britain. The whole conceptualization of global Britain in the foreign policy of various kinds of governments is very much about preserving, prolonging

and enforcing empire with all the reactionary violence that goes with it. And we need to grasp the fact that empire is still a project of ongoing violence. It is about holding captive in society

Literally, when it comes to Africa, for example, in the Bantustan prisons that were created from the 1884-1885 Berlin conference that are called nation states, are nothing but artificial.

comes of incarcerating our indigenous nations and communities of resistance. So we feel that violence in terms of just looking at the map of Africa as it is today, which

Britain, its NATO allies are intent on keeping as it is and not keeping in terms of just the borders, but also keeping in terms of the institutions that they've left behind that only operate to the benefit

of Britain and not to that of our indigenous nations and communities. And it's very, very important to actually look at Africa, not in terms of the artificially created nation states that serve

up till today, the interests of the colonizing powers, Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, but to look at the Africa of our imprisoned indigenous nations and communities, that continue to be strangled by the very existence and imposition of this colonized Africa.

And, you know, without trying to belabor this point, the curse of a nation state by Basil Davidson, one of the foremost British, you know, historians, you know, African history historians, you know, would tell you a lot about what these current nation states in Africa, you know, represent in terms of institutionalized reactionary violence. And it's important also to look at

the class and national issues that are inherent in this. Because what Britain particularly and all the European colonizing powers have done is to actually engage in social engineering in our countries, but artificially bringing about a class

That has its interests vested in the maintenance of coloniality. Therefore, the

The compradore bourgeois elements that we have, that are the conduits through which Britain and other colonial powers continue to misrule our nations. It's something that we must look at. And therefore, to protect themselves, they always call upon the colonizing power to help

them assert their control. And in exchange for that, they open up our countries to be pillaged in terms of their resources. And then we have the lion's share of these resources taken out for literally nothing.

And the only payment is literally the commissions that are given to these, you know, compradore bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements for the role they play in maintaining empire, you know, under still the cover of so-called independent, you know, African states. We could go on and on about this, but it's important that this, this, this, this,

clear picture of global Britain as the continuing empire of Britain, that picture we must hold it. And the reactionary violence with which that goes on. Then, of course, there is mounting pressure as far as reparations is concerned. But where has that come from? For example, African people who were

torn away from their homelands and enslaved, you know, wecked, you know, literally to death, you know, in the so-called Americas. Land also stolen from the indigenous peoples, you know, of Abiyala, right? You know, and

This discourse on this struggle for reparations has been there from time immemorial. Africans who were torn away from their continent at that very moment wanted to return home.

They wanted everything, particularly their human dignity taken away from them to be restored to them. And they fought even on the oceans to assert their dignity. They established settlements of their own in faraway jungles, in the so-called Americas, just to have a semblance of their sovereignty. So that is reparations.

And never, never seriously did enslaved Africans, even in the diaspora, make monetary payment due to their demand for reparations. Because at the end of the day,

how are we going to reckon the life of even one single human being, right? And who's reckoning? Is it the European reckoning or is it the African reckoning, right? And then again, you know, what are we talking about in terms of even law, in terms of statecraft and so on? You know, these crimes of enslavement were committed in Africa, right? Through violations of African law and systems of justice.

Why is it now that everything is being reckoned in terms of European ideas about law, justice, reparations, and so on and so forth. So cognitive justice in all of this is absolutely essential. And that's why we talk about planetary pests in terms of not just reparatory justice, but also cognitive justice and environmental justice. The whole colonization enterprise across the world,

be it in Africa, be it in Asia, be it in Abiyela, be it in Oceania, has been one of, you know, ecocide, destroying the environment just to be able to create a global economy that suits Europe at the expense not just of our people in terms of human beings, but flora and fauna. This is the reality. So ecocide has been going on from time immemorial. Now,

It is important that these things are factored into truth-telling because as the official reparations discourse is going with, you know,

institutions of coloniality like the rest of the West Indies and the elites who run it, right? And the governments that come along with playing their usual neo-colonial roles who don't understand that a beginning of reparatory justice actually should mean, you know, dismantling

the entire state mechanisms of neocolonialism that they operate. Now, these governments are refusing to die. They're reducing the whole conversation around reparations with the connivance of these pseudo-intellectuals in these places like the University of West Indies to just discussing money and who should be paid what money, which is actually adding insult to the injuries that we feel.

At the end of the day, that is why truth-telling is absolutely essential, right? And truth-telling must begin with the work that colonized communities of resistance are doing, you know, first of all, to protect themselves against the continuing ravages of coloniality, you know, and to be able to, you know,

resurrect and expand their anti-colonial resistance. Anti-colonial resistance in terms of our national liberation struggles, and the class struggles against those social groups.

that have vested interest in colonialism. That is the essence of the everyday lives of our people today, right? And this truth, you know, must reflect that. So if we're going to pursue any truth telling work, it must be connecting into the structures that these indigenous and other communities of resistance are creating, you know, in continuity of their anti-colonial resistance.

so that we get to actually, first and foremost, colonized peoples of the world should be telling their truths to each other. We should get to know the actual experience of coloniality that our indigenous nations are experiencing right now, which we do not know. How many people, Africans, know that the

preferred indigenous name for the so-called America. What do we know about the aborigines in Australia and their real communities of resistance and the organizations they are building and the forms of resistance in which the aborigines struggle? And it is to serve that purpose that we created the People's Internationalist Forum for Intercommunity Lifelong Learning. Indigenous communities of resistance, first and foremost, must get to know about each other.

get to know about their struggles, coordinate those struggles at local, national, international levels. We talk about localizing that resistance, which is from the local to the global dimensions of that resistance. And

All of these are part of the measures of truth-telling that eventually will build colonized peoples into the force that can not only liberate themselves but also liberate their oppressors because nations that continue to oppress us

are also oppressing themselves. The key to emancipation for all of us, which is what should be the purpose of these truth-telling exercises, should be the emancipation of humanity. And that is something we all can do together. Thank you.

Thank you very much. That was powerful and really important, Kofi. Thank you for being here to say this. Our last speaker is Senator Lydia Thorpe. Take it away. Thank you. And thank you, sister and brother.

I have a degree in life, so my articulation is not going to be as good as you both. I'm just so incredibly honoured to sit with you both and learn. And I think you're right. We need to share what colonisation looks like for us to be able to heal. Healing is also as important as truth-telling.

And, you know, being in colonisers' headquarters is really confronting in itself for me as a sovereign black woman from what is now called Australia. I struggle even saying that word because we have 600 language groups where I'm from and that's not recognised, that's not acknowledged. And there is a sophistication of genocide that continues today.

to hurt my people, my country, my water, our totems, our song, dance, culture, law. And, you know, it comes from here. This is the epitome of colonisation and that's why I told the king off when he come to my country because he deserved to be told off and that was part of truth-telling.

My country was founded on a lie, the lie of terra nullius, for them to say that no one lived there.

No one occupied our country when, you know, we are the oldest continuing living culture on the planet and we had a sophisticated law system, we had a sophisticated society that sustained us for thousands of generations and the audacity for these boats to rock up with cook

and say that no one was there, so let's just put our British flag in and take over this country, is an act of war. That was a declaration of war on our people. And that has not stopped. Today, you know, we have 24,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care.

They said sorry because of the stolen generation as if it's finished and done with but it continues today. The assault is just as real today as it was then.

The deaths in custody, we're continually dealing with Aboriginal people being killed by the system. The prison system is full of Aboriginal people, particularly Aboriginal children, where children as young as 10 are being locked up for, you know, kids that have stolen a chocolate bar are being locked up. They still use spit hoods.

children in the so-called lucky country of Oz. So you know that the whole definition of genocide is still real. Stealing children, causing harm to a group of people, the suicide rates are the highest anywhere. Our people have just

The misery and the pain that our people feel every day, you know, it just... The loss of land, language and culture gives this hopelessness feeling to our people to the point where people are taking their lives. A lot of our young people, particularly men, incarceration of Aboriginal women is through the roof and it's all swept under the carpet.

It's part of the colonial project that they set out to annihilate us and get rid of us. And they haven't been able to do that because we've resisted and we've survived mass murder, massacres all over the country and being part of the colony and being a senator

in being an independent senator and seeing the policies continuing to oppress our people, to oppress our rights is soul destroying. And I was talking to an elder from Turtle Island, what is now called Canada, the colonizers called Canada, and he called it the second wave of genocide.

because it's assimilate or die and I'm seeing that more and more. I'm almost 52. I've seen so many of our people pass away in my lifetime and I've seen so many people assimilate in my lifetime and just think that it's just too hard to fight the system. We might as well be part of the system and just go with the flow and

colonise ourselves and that's part of the problem. It's the art of war that we're still dealing with. And I'm there to shape the colony, to call out the colony for what it is and to maintain that resistance as part of the black sovereign movement.

And the black sovereign movement is made up of staunch elders that have fought longer than I've been alive, who've taught me what sovereignty is and what sovereignty looks like. The king in this place, he doesn't have sovereignty to our land. He's not from the land. He's not from the soil. His blood is not in our land.

So how can he say that he is sovereign to our land? He's not sovereign and he's not our king. Certainly not my king. So we will continue to call that out. Truth telling is part of the healing. It's been a hard fight to even get that on the agenda in the colony.

We have a truth-telling process that's just winding up in what is now called Victoria, in my home state. And it's come up with some incredible recommendations through having elders and community tell their stories of truth-telling. We've had the police apologise one week and then next week continue to kill our people in custody.

And we have a government, a Labor government, that says this is great and takes some selfies with the people that are involved in the truth-telling process and then don't implement any of the recommendations when they're handed the report. So where is the justice?

If we're going to have truth-telling, there's got to mean something. There's got to be some action from truth-telling. The pain that our people go through from just telling their story and they're not having any justice at the end of it, what's the point?

You know, we're so reeling in the trauma of having our children taken, our people incarcerated and profiled by the violence of the colony every day that we just want some peace.

And that's why the pursuit for treaty, a sovereign treaty, is also important for a lot of our people. And truth telling was meant to get us there. But it is hard in the colony. I'm not here to say, you know, it's so amazing and it's great to be colonised. It's the most violent experience of genocide and mass murder.

and this ongoing war against our people. In terms of reparations, you know, they throw crumbs on the table and we're expected to be grateful for the pittance that they provide for ruining a person's life, a family's life. When you have a mother ripped from the breast of a mother, a child ripped from the breast of a mother...

and given 10 or 20 thousand dollars, Australian dollars, to say I'm sorry, here's a bit of money, there's no amount of money that can repair the damage that they've caused to that child and that family and the generations after that. It's intergenerational trauma that sets in.

And no-one is immune to that. I'm not immune to that as a black sovereign senator. I've had cousins die in custody. I've had cousins plead with the prison guards to help, "Help, please help me. I'm dying, I'm dying." And the prison guards looking through the camera, watching my cousin die in the prison floor. I've had family members...

have their children removed. Just because a woman is experiencing a family violence situation, they come in and they take the children as if it was a woman's fault for being in that situation. And in my country, if you haven't sorted out

your life in two years and that child is gone forever. Just for... After two years, you lose your baby forever. I mean, if that's not an ongoing genocide, then what is? We're not as... Our population is not as big as it used to be. And I can understand why some of our people assimilate, because it is. It's hard to be an activist. It's hard to maintain the resistance.

And you have those two choices, assimilate or fight to the day that you die. And there's becoming fewer and fewer activists in my country because we know what the consequence will be. And I've got this black American counsellor who I speak to every fortnight, you know, because I don't want people to think I'm crazy or anything.

And he said, "Oh, Lydia, I have this man, this activist from my country, and he reminds me of you." And I'm like, "Yeah." And he's like, "Malcolm X." And I said, "Yeah, and how was he when he died, brother? Your job is to keep me alive."

So that's where it's at and that's where we've got to draw strength from one another and continue to fight the colony that continues to oppress us all and continues this sophistication of this genocide. I mean, we see with Palestine what genocide looks like in real time right now, but there's also this other genocide that's slow and...

sophisticated and working. And thank you very much for having me. Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question, like why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich?

Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now, back to the event. Thank you so much, Lydia. So we'll open up, we'll take, say, three questions from the floor and we'll see how long we can keep going. I saw this hand first. And then we'll go to the front and then at the back there. And then we'll go to the other side of the room.

Hi, thank you. My name is Nias and I am a master's student here at LSE in the Department of Media and Communications. And my question is for Dr. Umarin and Kofi in particular.

Actually, my dissertation research is on this particular area. By the way, I'm from Saint Lucia, one of the few countries that can claim to be both Anglophone and Francophone, given that the French and the British, you know, that tug of war between Saint Lucia. So my dissertation research focuses more on the media and the role of the media in basically shaping the perceived legitimacy of the reparations claims that we make.

And it's media both in Britain and in the Caribbean as well. So it's sort of like a comparative analysis. And I was reading yesterday, and I read something that was quite interesting. Two surveys that were done within the last year. The first one said that over 60% of white British people still don't favor reparations.

or any form of reparations. And when I continued to read, I found that over 80% of these same people actually don't know the depth of Britain's involvement or what actually happened during colonialism. And that sort of had me thinking that there is definitely a correlation between what they know

and the response to the whole issue of reparations because when you think of Britain's role during colonialism, right, where in the Caribbean over three million people, indigenous people, became 30,000 in the course of a century or two centuries, you spoke about the fact that people tend to look at reparations and see it just as monetary.

when CARICOM has a whole 10-point plan where it speaks about repertory justice in several areas in terms of healthcare infrastructure, education, for example. So my question to you is,

Given that lack of information, and I understand the importance of truth-telling, but how? When we still don't control the institutions like the LSC, like universities, we still don't control the media that sort of help build that counter truth-telling narrative.

So how exactly do we, what was the plan to actually ensure that the truth filters down, not just to the people who are seeking reparations, but the people who need to understand that their country, Britain, did play a significant role in basically the genocide of people within Africa, within the Caribbean and other regions. Thank you.

Hi, thank you. My name is Amani Mathura. I'm a media and communications student at LC as well. My question is specifically for Dr. Umuaran. I'm from a generation in the Caribbean where people tend to believe that there's no value in looking behind and looking at the past. And there's this kind of obsession with globalization and modernization and looking to the future.

And there's also this belief that issues of racial capitalism and inequalities, these are American problems or UK problems, and we in the Caribbean, we're kind of sheltered from it to an extent. But how do we impress upon people the importance of looking at the truth of our past and how these issues continue to affect us and move away from this obsession of there's no value in dwelling on it? I'll take one more question at the back. Thank you.

Thank you so much. I would appreciate if you would actually indulge me for a minute or two. I will not be very long. It may have to be a minute. I was listening to the program on Radio 4 yesterday. It's called 1945 Elections.

We might have to keep it to a minute because we do only have an hour, and we want to fill in more questions. It's very interesting what actually the programme said, that in 1945, during the elections, that more than 90% of the British subjects could not name one part of the British Empire, which actually says whatever...

was done in the name of the British citizens, British subjects, was not only without their consent, it was without their knowledge and information. Fast forward to what we are actually seeing in Palestine. The American proxy in the region is quite patently, obviously, and visibly is conducting a genocidal war

against the people in Gaza without the consent of its population. I'm sorry, sir, I hate to interrupt. It's a very important point, but could you get to a question? I am coming to my question, which is what can we do as the citizens, either of the United States or United Kingdom,

to actually hold our governing masters accountable to what they're actually doing. Prime Minister Stommer has been supporting the... Thank you, sir. I'm sorry. I agree with you completely, and I think many in this room do so. I think we'll hand it over to the panel. Thank you for your question. Accountability.

Thank you. We'll let each of the panelists respond in turn. We'll start in speaking order. Dr. Moran. Thank you for that question. I mean, the surveys that you discussed, I think, speak to the real dearth of historical knowledge. As a historian, I would say that. But yes, I do think there is such a lack of history teaching on this subject.

whether it's secondary school, even at university level, there is so much, I think, timidity, I would say, in wanting to really grapple with the reality of the British Empire in the Caribbean. And that, I think, has played such an important role in the distance that the general public has about the knowledge of what the British Empire was.

in the Caribbean, but also what the British Empire was in Britain. There's this idea still that empire is something that's very far away and distant, but actually because of the entangled proximity between the Caribbean and Britain in the work that I do, you see the real, real vivid everyday impacts of the British Empire on British people themselves, including British people who are of Caribbean descent.

And so for me, part of the truth-telling, part of trying to, I guess, grapple with the gap in those statistics that you said, is repeating this history again and again and again, over and over and over, because there will always be detractors who will say the British Empire was this wonderful, great example of brotherhood and benevolence, when we know that that was never the case, that was never the intention of the Empire, and that was never the reality of the Empire for millions of its subjects.

And this overlaps with your question about how the Caribbean people themselves are also sometimes invested in this idea that the Caribbean is distinct or unique, but racial capitalism, its home is in the Caribbean. And again, it is preaching the importance of this history and how this history is a living history, how it has not in any way been fully reckoned with or addressed.

And also not just repeating the history, but I think going back to what Lydia said, thinking about history from my perspective as part of the healing process, as part of the reparations process as well, reckoning with our history is so vital in so many different parts of the world to understanding our present and contemporary. And the more we repeat this history, I feel like that can be a little bit on the stepping stones towards addressing these issues.

That's a classic historical, historian's answer, I think, but that's my response. Thank you. Kofi, would you like to say anything? Yeah, well, you see, for me, it is not just about history in terms of what is in the past. It's really about the present. You know, how many people really can interpret their present, right? You know, for us in Africa, right,

who today are denied the right to tell our own stories and interpret even our present for ourselves. Because there's BBC, there is CNN, there's all these stations that bombard us. But there's also control of our educational institutions from kindergarten right to university, which are all cast in the colonial system.

I mean, hardly any university in Ghana, in the country of my birth, functions outside of the control of the British educational system. They bring teachers and heads of institutions to train them here.

as much as they train our army officers, they train our police officers and so on and so forth. Coloniality is very, very real, right? And I think that it is not just people in Britain who are not informed.

about what colonialism has been and what coloniality in the present is. It is also the colonized themselves. It was Steve Vico who said this, right? The most powerful weapon in the hands of a colonizer is the mind of the colonized.

And the minds of our colonized people are still very much in the hands of the colonizers and their institutions. And that is why we need, in terms of what should we do, what can we do? I think we really have to make the decolonization of education

through truth telling, very much part and parcel of this. And let's be involved at every level. For example, what is the actual truth about LSE in the experiences of the British Empire?

Osajibwa Kwame Nkrumah, one of the leading figures in the anti-colonial struggle in Africa who led not just my country Ghana to independence, but also tried to rally African people both on the continent and diaspora together to build a global unity for their self-emancipation, attended this institution.

He applied to do his PhD in this industry and immediately came up against the walls of coloniality in terms of how he should pursue knowledge.

which knowledge counts, that of his indigenous account nation or that of empire. Now, so I think that for those of you who are in this place, either as teachers or as students, you know, your challenge is, you know, what is LSC and coloniality today? You know, what role can you play in the decolonization of LSC? Following the footsteps, you know, and experiences of the likes of Kwame Nkrumah.

We are working on Nkrumah and LSE, Africa and Europe encounters for decolonization. I think that this is where the whole truth telling thing has to be. It has to be the work of people who grapple with the truth in their present day lives and then connect the dots into history.

And that is how this whole thing is about visions for the future. If you live lives in the past, and you

and you live lies in the present, you only live lies in the future. And so all these grand themes that you bring up, visions of the future, let's confront it in a truth-telling spirit. And I think that if there are people here who are prepared to work with

young people in Ghana, in schools, colleges, universities in Ghana who are now looking at the issue of Nkrumah and LSE, what were his experiences here, that they should learn from in identifying, confronting coloniality in Ghana today. I think that kind of working together, which you as academics can be part of together with our community school activities,

These are the practical things that we can do, particularly in spaces of education like LSE. Do you mind, Lydia, if I take a few more questions and then come to you first? So we'll take two from the room. Hand there and the woman in front as well. Sorry. Are there any questions online? Just one question. We'll have one question online and then we'll prioritize people in the room again.

Hi, my name is Jamie. I did my Master's in the History Department at LSE last year. The question I wanted to pose to all three of you is that whether we like it or not, we have to work with colonial institutions or institutions which are part of a colonial legacy. How far are we from looking at a reality where reparations can be made in a way that is structural, not just performative?

Yeah. Thank you. Maybe we have the question online and then the woman behind, Helena. Okay, this one is from Aditya, an undergrad student of economics from India. Her question is, what role should former colonial powers like the UK play in the development of former subject countries today? How should they pay back the historical debt that they owe?

Really appreciating how succinct these questions are. Thank you. Next one, please. Hi. Wonderful to see you, Asha, again, and Kofi from the workshop last week. Yeah. So I guess my question is to the panel in general. How do we understand and expand the scope of reparations? So much like the question before, because most of us understand reparations in terms of majorly financial compensation.

And so one of these, whenever we have these state visits, just as the one that Lydia mentioned, so whenever the king visits India, for example, we often bring up these instances of truth-telling where we talk about massacres that happened that refused to be acknowledged by the British Empire. And we talk about where there was genocidal intent in the way that murdering was happening, or the fact that language has played a very important role in which what we call our first war of independence is mentioned here as the Sepoy Mutiny. And

and dismissed as something that was over administrative reasons rather than asking for independence for the last 200 years or so. So what is the role of language in this discourse of reparations and how do we make it understand that reparations do can also mean beyond financial compensation from empire? So yeah, that's my question.

OK, we have five minutes left, so I'm also going to ask the speakers to watch their time. But more time for Lydia, as we didn't hear from her before. I'll try and be really quick. So, to the first question, just responding to that, when I was growing up, I was taught that Captain Cook discovered Australia. And, you know, we were lied... I was lied to. The people that were going to school in those days were lied to because of the colonial project.

And in my country today, they still celebrate murderers right across, particularly in Gunai country, there's still statues of murderers, there's hotels, there's cafes still celebrating the murderers that killed my, in particular, my clan group members, the Brabalung tribe.

We need to take it to the streets. I just left the Palestinian rally, 100,000 people. That was incredible. That's part of healing too, coming together, solidarity. You know, we are all Palestinians at the end of the day because we all need to fight for the liberation and freedom and peace for all of us to be free.

And we also need to educate people about how to vote. We've got to get rid of these racists and these Zionists out of decision-making, you know, right across the world. There's too many in power that are causing so much harm to so many people.

Reparations, well, you know, people need to pay the rent for being on stolen land, particularly in my country, the universities, they benefit from stolen land. They need to pay the rent.

We have to pay for burials of our people. We've got people in morgues, you know, they're still in morgues nine months later before I left. I've got communities reaching out to me because we've got bodies sitting in morgues that have been there for nine months because our people can't afford to get them out to bury them on their own country. So we want land back. We shouldn't have to pay for burials of our own people who are dying as a result of...

genocide and colonization and yeah pay back what they owe just just pay the rent and yes it's not all about money land back is very important there's a lot of Crown land still left in my country that should automatically be given back and without a treaty we have no peace without justice we have no peace thank you Lydia one minute left

The only quick thing I would like to say, I hope to say, for us, reparations is our ongoing struggle for decolonization. And there is a certain misconception as if colonized peoples don't still have their liberation movement. We have our movements at the grassroots of our communities of resistance.

and look to these communities of resistance to find these movements that are making reparations the everyday work that they are doing. And that is multiple. For example, an essential thing is building alternative educational institutions.

So our indigenous communities are now creating their own educational institutions that are teaching in their own languages and teaching from the perspective of their own values and so on. And challenging the institutions of coloniality in terms of the delivery of quality education that is meaningful to people in our communities.

So education is a terrain of reparations struggles. And I think that that is where the talk about colonial institutions. Yes, colonial institutions are here and they're not going to vanish overnight. But like Nkrumah, Cabral, and others who came into these spaces and met these terrains of resistance.

Bringing the knowledges of their own communities of resistance into these spaces and challenging the colonial concepts that were being forced down on them. Walter Rodney and others passed through these institutions. And that's why it's important that you go and read about the experiences of Nkrumah in LSE. He didn't come here and say, okay, I'm a white man.

my brain is like that of an empty bucket just pour in your colonial bullshit. No, he came here with his account

I can't indigenous knowledge to say, yes, let's battle this out, a battle of ideas. And I think that that is what you ought to do. You students, particularly who come from colonial communities into these spaces, right? You should bring with you your idea, read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and it's all there about how you engage in these spaces and example of people like Walter Rodney and others. And I think that by making...

educational institutions, terrains of struggle for decolonization, that is how reparatory justice, the cost of reparatory justice will be advanced. And that's a concrete thing I want to leave you with.

Thank you, Kofi. Last word from you. Yeah, just on the reparations, just to kind of add to what Kofi was saying, I think it's really important to bear in mind there's multiple different forms of reparations and that oftentimes the kind of radical voices of reparations are not the ones you hear about in the newspaper. You'll hear about what Prime Minister so-and-so thinks of reparations in the Caribbean. And I think we really have to be careful and mindful of the way in which perhaps reparations may be co-opted

into being something that is far more moderate, conservative. We must remember the radical forms of reparations and the possibilities of what those radical reparations can look like because we have to think about reparations from the grassroots up, thinking about the poorest communities, the indigenous communities, the communities who are stressing the importance of gender-based violence and how that was so implicated in the colonial project, which is oftentimes not discussed amongst political leaders.

So I would just like to end by saying it's really important to remember the radical voices of reparations and to not be swayed by the suits, the politicians who might have a very different stance about what reparations should look like. That makes sense.

Thank you very much, all of you, for being here. I'm so sorry that I had to not... I couldn't get to everyone's questions and I keep having to cut the panellists off, but hopefully this conversation is just the beginning. So we've got a QR code here. Kofi and I have been working together for the last six months trying to think through how we can not just bring communities of resistance together on these issues of empire, but also start a public discussion in Britain.

about what the reality of empire really is. And we would love to be able to share any future events with you if you're interested in working with us. Fill out the form and hopefully we can stay in touch and keep the conversation going. So thank you so much for your time. Enjoy the rest of your afternoon. And Dr Moran's book is on sale downstairs and she will be there to help sign copies. Help sign copies. Thank you.

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