The International Writers Magazine - Our Tenth Year: Historical Query

---

Who's afraid of History? • Rama Varma The other day, as I was idly surfing channels, I chanced upon a historical film about the British invasion of Zululand. I did not watch all of it, but one particular episode stayed in mind. A British envoy tells the Zulu king that Zulu laws are barbaric; that he should adopt British law, or else face its guns.

At school, history was not on my list of favourite subjects, although it did not make it to most-hated list either. Faced with the stark black and white of the question paper, facts and figures seemed to winnow through the sieve of memory. What was cause number four that led up to the Civil Disobedience? When did the American Civil war end? The only figures that remained were the marks on the last report card and the comments in red below.

Yet, when I see a historical film now, even a poor one, I am eager to find out more about the period. Are the points of view representative? What are the liberties that the filmmaker took? And so on.

I may have heard of the invasion of Zululand before, but what made me look it up was the image of the loin-clothed Zulu king when he asks the haughty British officer why he should adopt British law when he did not go about asking the latter to adopt Zulu law. If a sense of fairness is anything to go by, that dignified Zulu king had bucketfuls more of civilization than the British who were trying to pump civilization into him. More than an entire chapter of colonial history, that short episode of the Zulu king tells of the curious pairing of the missionary and the mercenary in the mind of the imperialist. So, when Mugabe asks Britain to mind its own business, it seems like deja vu. Maybe he is a monster. Western governments do have a long tradition of rearing cuddly-bear tyrants who break their leashes and turn into monsters. But that’s another lesson from history. (Although his Marxist training may have come from another source: Ed)

It seems to me that at school we were missing the most important element. We crammed and regurgitated in roman numerals the period of reign of some faraway king; On drowsy afternoons we drooled over the merits of the American constitution; but our teachers forgot history is essentially about people. It is about how we - communities, races, nations - got here. It is about being inspired or cautioned by the great stories of our past. It is about how we apply those lessons, wisely or otherwise, to the present and the future.
Rama Varma May 2009
RVarma@ssp-uk.com

More Comment

Home

© Hackwriters 1999-2009 all rights reserved - all comments are the writers' own responsibility - no liability accepted by hackwriters.com or affiliates.