Now, with her passing, there are new efforts to address the colonial past, or hide it. Yiannis Spanos, president of the Association of National Organization of Cypriot Fighters, said the queen was “held by many as bearing responsibility” for the island's tragedies. In ethnically divided Cyprus, many Greek Cypriots remembered the four-year guerrilla campaign waged in the late 1950s against colonial rule and the queen's perceived indifference over the plight of nine people whom British authorities executed by hanging. On Saturday, Gaza's Hamas rulers called on King Charles III to “correct” British mandate decisions that they said oppressed Palestinians. There were few signs of public grief or even interest in her death across the Middle East, where many still hold Britain responsible for colonial actions that drew much of the region's borders and laid the groundwork for many of its modern conflicts. But she was also the symbol of a nation that often rode roughshod over people it subjugated.
Some historians see her as a monarch who helped oversee the mostly peaceful transition from empire to the Commonwealth, a voluntary association of 56 nations with historic and linguistic ties. That wealth is something never shared in,” said Bert Samuels, a member of the National Council on Reparations in Jamaica.Įlizabeth's reign saw the hard-won independence of African countries from Ghana to Zimbabwe, along with a string of Caribbean islands and nations along the edge of the Arabian Peninsula. “This commonwealth of nations, that wealth belongs to England. Some called for apologies for past abuses like slavery, others for something more tangible.Īlso Read | India’s tribute to Queen Elizabeth II Tricolour flies half-mast at Red Fort “ The most iconic figure of the 20th and 21st centuries,” Uhuru Kenyatta called her.Īnger came from ordinary people. “I cannot mourn.”īut Kenya's outgoing president, Uhuru Kenyatta, whose father, Jomo Kenyatta, was imprisoned during the queen's rule before becoming the country's first president in 1964, overlooked past troubles, as did other African heads of state. “Most of our grandparents were oppressed,” Mugo tweeted in the hours after the queen's death Thursday. While over 100,000 Kenyans were rounded up in camps under grim conditions, others, like Mugo's grandmother, were forced to request British permission to go from place to place.Īlso Read | Queen Elizabeth II passes away at 96: A look at her 3 visits to India It was issued four years into the queen's reign, and well into Britain's harsh response to the Mau Mau rebellion against colonial rule. In Kenya, where decades ago a young Elizabeth learned of her father's death and her enormous new role as queen, a lawyer named Alice Mugo shared online a photograph of a fading document from 1956. For many, the queen came to represent all of that during her seven decades on the throne.
Talk has turned to the legacies of colonialism, from slavery to corporal punishment in African schools to looted artifacts held in British institutions. Today, in the British Empire's former colonies, her death brings complicated feelings, including anger.īeyond official condolences praising the queen's longevity and service, there is some bitterness about the past in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and elsewhere. Upon taking the throne in 1952, Queen Elizabeth II inherited millions of subjects around the world, many of them unwilling.
0 kommentar(er)
