Many people around here have heard or read such colourful figures as Lawrence of Arabia. Or Richard Burton. Or Gertrude Bell. These were all sons and daughters of the British empire at the time when Britannia indeed ruled the waves, and the sun never set on the Empire, because, literally when it was dusk at one end of the realm it was already light at the other. Or so it seemed.

There was something about Brits wherever they found themselves that set them apart from other Europeans and others of the White race. More than many other members of the “Mzungu” race, they had panache in many things they did, and plenty of cheek, too. I understand in those days, some Englishmen travelling in foreign lands would explain at the border that they did not have a passport because they did not need one; you see, they were English!

In movies, this was captured for me in two films I remember well. One was “Zulu Dawn” in which a couple of British lads land at the Cape and they are accosted by a Zulu “impi” who asks them what they have come to do in Zululand. And the answer from the Englishmen is. We come in the name of Queen Victoria, Queen of all Africa”!

In another movie that I watched a long time ago, a couple of British adventurers stray into a hostile land to the north of India, putatively present-day Afghanistan, and at the gate they are confronted by the question from the city gate-keeper: “Are you gods?”. The natives have lived for many decades under the spell of Alexander the Great, whom they idolize as a god who they believe will return sometime in the future. Their answer to the question is, “No, but we are English, the next best thing!”

Some time ago I interviewed an old Britisher who had served in colonial Tanganyika in the 1950s and he shared his experience as a small English boy on his first day at school. They were brought to attention and the headmaster stood up, surveyed them with a sense of pure satisfaction as he informed them rather imperiously: Boys, I want to tell you that you are all English, and that means you have won your first lottery in life”! It is this kind of grit that formed the esprit de corps of excessive overconfidence and the resultant arrogance which allowed the Brits to get away with murder, literally, in their dealings with lesser mortals…. In the Indian subcontinent, in the Americas and the Caribbean, in Africa, the Arab world, and elsewhere.

Some of the exploits of the British of which we deal with in this section are clearly nefarious, both in their conception and in their execution, sometimes outright bestial. Some can be appreciated as the very natural behaviour of a colonial beast which is wont to be just that, a colonial beast, no more, no less. Whatever the case, we will try to be as true and as fair as possible in our presentation of facts so that on that score, at
least, we may have as little imagination as possible and leaving interpretation to the reader or listener.

To be continued…