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London Bridge has fallen down, and it seems we all need a history lesson

The opinions expressed in this article are the writer’s own and do not reflect the views of Her Campus.
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at UCT chapter.

It’s insane how mundane the days that ‘flip everything on its head’ actually feel and September 8th was no different. I remember sitting outside the law library, actively avoiding the essay I had come to the library to write and then scrolling on Twitter and seeing reports – at that point I decided that they were just rumours – about Queen Elizabeth II being in her final moments. A couple of hours later, the news of her death was officially announced.

Anyone active on Twitter knows how chaotic the app tends to be, so you can only imagine the chaos that erupted after the queen’s death was announced. So many debates and back-and-forths about who she was and what her legacy actually is. Too many misunderstandings and dismissals. Too many people’s reactions to her death were policed. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I found that this chaos spilled over onto Instagram, TikTok and even personal WhatsApp groups. It was inescapable.

Now that things have calmed down and I have had time to really think about this, what struck me the most is that many people, too many in fact, have no real understanding of colonialism, imperialism and what it means to exist as the global ‘other.’ The other, scarier thought; they understand but they just don’t care. Too many people were more concerned with politeness and order than they were with truth and justice. Too many people were more concerned with preserving the sweet grandmother, white feminist icon, ahead-of-her-time image of the queen than they were with the truth of the devastating consequences her reign and that of her family (past and present) has had on the world – particularly the global south.  

I have been having a lot of thoughts about the way and the extent to which I was taught about colonialization in school. We first learnt about it in Grade 5, and I remember it being taught fresh off the heels of the section about the Renaissance period and the sense of adventure and exploration that permeated Europe as a result of this. My history teacher, was obsessed with ships and boats and so we spent a great deal of time obsessing over the craftsmanship of colonial ships and learning about the men who ‘braved the treacherous seas in search of something beyond the worlds they had known.’ What he casually glossed over was that the ‘something beyond’ was the land and resources of people who would later be violently dispossessed of and displaced from said land and resources by these ‘adventurers’ under the orders of the monarchies that sent them in search of others’ land and riches.

It is as though we have been engineered to gloss over colonialism and its pervasive consequences from the moment we began learning about it in school. It was taught like a blip in time and so we look at it as such; with no real understanding of the consequences that “blip” has had on society today. If anything, the continued praise of the royal family, and the subsequent punishment of anyone who critiques their long history of dehumanising, dispossessing and displacing people, is proof that far too many people either don’t understand or don’t care – because they’re racist, classist, sexist… – about how extremely inhumane and cruel colonialism is.

Words often fail me (and I am finding it difficult to put this into words right now) when I try to make sense of how insane it actually is that we have normalised people acquiring obscene amounts of wealth at the expense of other people, the environment, and basic human rights. The royal family is the epitome of our obsession with the glamorisation of wealth and opulence at the expense of people’s lives and livelihoods. Many people in defence of the queen argued that so much of the dehumanisation, dispossession and displacement didn’t even happen under her reign. They argue that she ruled over the ‘former’ colonies far more fairly and more justly than those who preceded her on the throne but skip over the fact that those colonised nations were never hers (or anyone in her family’s) to rule in the first place. She is praised for doing the bare minimum – ‘granting ‘formerly’ colonised nations their ‘independence’’ was not an act of kindness but one of cunning thought; the world was changing and if the royal family were to adapt, they would have to change their ways – or at least make it look like they did.

 Furthermore, albeit to a lesser extent than those who preceded her (and this is very much up for debate), she also contributed to the enslavement and subjugation of people, and she also watched as people’s resistance to the British invasion of their nations was violently suppressed in her name. The worst of it, however, is that she said little to nothing about this violent suppression of their resistance to the loss of their languages, land, and cultures. This means that even if she “had no prior knowledge” of the violence that would be employed in her name, she, through her silence, effectively approved it retrospectively and we tend to casually gloss over this. Her being a white feminist icon and someone’s grandmother cannot be what we use to justify erasing the things that people suffered through, which she was complicit in.

Colonisation was the theft of land, lives, livelihoods, loved ones, languages… and we are worlds away from recovering those things. Colonialism is the continued effort – through attitude, the threat of economic sanctions, and the hegemony of western ideals and knowledge – to make those things irrecoverable. For many people, those who preceded the queen were the face of the former and she, the latter.  Again, in my mind any disdain towards their reaction to her death is either a deep lack of understanding of what colonisation and colonialism are or a deep lack of respect for the things people suffered as a result.

If you wish to know more or understand this better, you can start with the link below for Trevor Noah’s behind segment on the Daily Show aptly titled ‘Why Must Everyone Mourn the Queen’s Passing,’ and then you can find and read books about this topic that your history teacher would have been afraid to suggest.

A fun-loving, catnapping, overthinking human being trying to move through this beautifully chaotic thing that is life.