Queen’s Platinum Jubilee: 5 Days of Faded Glory in A Collective Mis-Remembering of Empire

Intro: ". . .Around the world, as evidenced by the protests during recent royal tours of the Caribbean and the determination expressed by those nations to rid themselves of the queen as head of state, the demand for an acknowledgement of the truth and for justice is building steam.

If the UK persists in trying to hide from its dark past, it risks its international reputation and standing being consumed by it."

Queen’s Platinum Jubilee: A collective misremembering of empire

The queen today is the Dr Jekyll to the UK’s Mr Hyde – encapsulating the glory and benevolence of empire with the evil separated out.

[Patrick Gathara/Al Jazeera]

 

Patrick Gathara

aljazeera.com |

In his 1886 Gothic novella, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson tells the tale of Dr Henry Jekyll, wealthy, well-born, and highly respected, who develops a potion that enables him to separate his evil desires from the control of his good self, thus giving rise to the grotesque and deformed Edward Hyde. Jekyll believes that he can receive the pleasure that both parts of his being crave without each being encumbered by the demands of the other.

Watching media coverage of festivities marking Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee – 70 years since she acceded to the throne – I could not help feeling that the British state had achieved something similar. The pomp and circumstance surrounding the celebrations, from the marching troops to beacons lit around the world, were undoubtedly reminiscent of the long-faded glories of the empire, which today are personified by the queen and her family. However, the memory of the horrors that empire visited on millions around the globe – where, to borrow Jekyll’s description of his alter-ego Hyde, “evil … had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay” – was almost completely absent from the telling.

> It was during a visit to Kenya in February 1952 that she learned of her father’s death and became queen. . .The romanticised tale of the girl who went up a tree a princess and descended a queen tends to ignore the circumstances she was thrust into as well as the death, torture, brutalisation and dispossession of Kenyans that would mark the first decade of her reign. Needless to say, little of that made it into the Platinum Jubilee brochure.

> A large part of the international media seemed to obsess over the reactions of four-year-old Prince Louis to the Royal Air Force (RAF) flypast, his facial expressions drawing “howls of delight and amusement from the watching crowd”. In November 1953, nearly two years into Elizabeth’s reign, my father would have been about the same age as Prince Louis. I doubt many journalists would spend any time imagining his reactions over the next 20 months as RAF planes flew over the concentration camps into which the British had forced 1.5 million people and dropped nearly six million bombs on Kenyans demanding their land and freedom. I imagine they would have been very different. . .

[.    ] Her Platinum Jubilee is a call to a collective misremembering of her imperial past and the violence and misery the state she heads and represents has wrought in the world. But like Jekyll, the supply of carefully crafted falsehoods keeping the Hyde-bound truth at bay is running out. Around the world, as evidenced by the protests during recent royal tours of the Caribbean and the determination expressed by those nations to rid themselves of the queen as head of state, the demand for an acknowledgement of the truth and for justice is building steam. If the UK persists in trying to hide from its dark past, it risks its international reputation and standing being consumed by it."

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.