Queen Elizabeth, much beloved mother and matriarch of her people, will be laid to rest tomorrow. Appropriately, a public holiday has been declared in honour of the great lady. The outburst of grief and affection has been unprecedented in its scale, scope and global intensity. For many people, it was as if the family’s favourite auntie has departed. Such was the level of international bonding with the British monarch.
Yet very rarely in history does an interminable mourning procession turn into an International Justice Tribunal. But when the person involved is one of the most extraordinary personages of the epoch, we must expect this kind of ghoulish and surreal drama which pulls at opposite strands of the entire gamut of human emotions.
Despite her affectation of simplicity, genuine common touch and cultivation of middle class values and bourgeois solidity, Elizabeth II was undoubtedly one of the titans of modern history. It takes a certain combination of charm and good luck to be so famously successful and not to be widely offensive. The late sovereign head of the United Kingdom charmed them all in the original African sense of holding people spellbound.
But last week as her earthly remains lay in stately repose and as an interminable queue of mourners snaked its way through the heart of London to pay their last respect, the potency of the medicine began to wear off a bit. While millions of genuinely bereaved Elizabethans stood still in dignified disbelief and regret, the anguished murmurs of many injured and dispossessed could also be heard around the world.
They echoed from the impoverished peripheries and hellholes of humanity and particularly from a Diaspora induced by different waves of colonization. While many grieved at the passing of a genuinely beloved monarch, the disaffected vented their spleen on the person they consider to be the ultimate symbol of colonial atrocities and racial indignities. One of these is a Nigerian-born American professor who offloaded a pile of bitter mush on the departing queen. It feels like the divine example of poetic justice.
A woman of stoic and stony temperament, Elizabeth Mary Windsor, the longest reigning sovereign in the history of Britain, would have been mildly miffed by it all. There are many people of weak constitution and tender palates, including this writer, who would have found the recriminations rather churlish and occasion inappropriate.
But international relations are not founded on international morality. Even if relations among nations were to be, it is no longer feasible in our bitterly divided world to celebrate genuine greatness and human distinction irrespective of provenance.
In a centrally fissured world seething with bile and discontent, it has proved impossible to cast our dark prejudices aside for a moment to celebrate our common humanity and one of its most iconic manifestations ever. You table that even in the most informed circles and murmurs of Stockholm syndrome rent the air.
After almost six hundred years of what Noam Chomsky, the distinguished MIT linguist, polymath and combustible contrarian, has called the five hundred year system of colonial expropriation and world-historic brutalities this is what the world has come to. Nothing is sacred anymore. Everything is bitterly contested and contestable. And human greatness itself has succumbed to the relativist rot.
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But we can no longer continue to blame others for our historic weaknesses and infirmities. The wisest thing to do is to study how they do it, so that history does not continue to repeat itself. There is a local adage which holds that if you see a person being pursued by furious masquerades and you do not reach for their pot of soup, when then are you going to benefit from the inscrutable ways of the gods?
By the time she joined her ancestors about two weeks ago, Queen Elizabeth had already passed into legend as the ultimate global symbol of constitutional monarchy. Blessed with long life, an iron constitution and uncommon tenacity, Elizabeth had even managed to surpass her legendary and formidable great, great grandmother, Queen Victoria, who had to forge a truly global empire from what their German cousins would call “blood, sweat and tears”.
Both remarkable women had acceded to the throne in very unpropitious circumstances of divided and conflicted sovereignty. But each went on to distinguish herself. In the case of the younger sovereign, she did it her own way. On her way, the dutiful and eager to learn Elizabeth mastered the art of being a revolutionary game changer while appearing a staid conservative. It was a class act in the most subversive nuance of the phrase. But it was also quintessentially English.
According to one of their great writers, George Orwell, England “has the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same”. For the subdued English royalty and aristocracy, it is the supreme survivalist strategy, having to become an aristocratic embodiment of middle class virtues. It is a change without changing. Long before the French proclaimed the cynical dictum that the more things change the more they remain the same, the English had already stumbled on the reality.
After almost four hundred years of upheavals and bloodletting on an industrial scale which climaxed with the gory decapitation of one of their kings, the British ruling classes have learnt not to toy with the lower masses. They must be placated rather than pacified. One way or the other, the unruly masses will have to be ruled by giving them what they need rather than what they crave. Let that other one remain at the realm of fantasy and imaginative day-dreaming.
It is an illusionist fantasia with the royal family providing the escape hatch to that dream world of longing but not quite belonging with their spectacular pageantry and arcane rituals. It is a bizarre sorcery of national regeneration and self-affirmation based on the exhumation of dead relics and other esoteric memorabilia. In their gold-plated horse-drawn carriages, gilded coaches and period automobiles, they transport the people back to a bygone world of absolute sovereigns and emperors.
But while they are at it, the real hatchet people who actually rule the nation and who superintend its daily affairs could be found huddling together with their red boxes on inter-city trains or espied being ferried to and from the real seat of power. In their sober departmental store suits and frumpy, off the peg blouse and skirts, they look like ordinary people doing regular chores. No attempt is made whatsoever to match the class and élan of the royalty and the aristocracy.
This is an age long distinction that must be maintained at the pain of death. It is a fine line that all parties must respect. The monarchy may be a costly distraction but it is a necessary distraction, a transcendental symbol of inclusiveness needed to sustain the unity and organic cohesion of a nation bitterly cobbled together. It is also there to insulate those who must reign from those who will rule.
The British ruling classes have learnt their lessons in a very hard way indeed. According to Simon Schama, the distinguished Dutch historian, several decades after, some battle fields in the Scottish Highlands and the English midlands still reeked of the foul and fetid stench of badly decomposed humanity. Despite the later rhapsody of the green, green grass of home and the allure of interminably rolling hills draped in verdure and pasture, medieval Britain was very much a vast killing field.
Unfortunately for the rest of the world, it would appear that it was this home franchise of brutal and unanswerable conquest that Britain would later export to the world as the first modern superpower. Having subdued their neighbours with maximum force, the sturdy islanders broke through the Channels in a spectacular foray which saw them establish their colonial dominion in places as far flung as India, Africa, North America, Australia, New Zealand and later China.
On their way, they had routed the intrepid Spaniards who thought the Brits were no better than seafaring marauders, the French who believed they were only a nation of shopkeepers and their self-regarding German siblings who dismissed them as weak, vacillating, unreliable and perfidious in the extreme.
How such a miniscule island-nation could chalk up such outlandish military successes remains a historic mystery. As recent as April 1982, the Argentines got their bloody comeuppance from Margaret Thatcher for daring to dispute British suzerainty over the Falkland Islands.
Surely, after the advent of the Industrial Revolution which gave them access to superior weaponry and munitions has been factored into the equation, some other things must be at play. Diffident in victory, calmly reticent in stunning triumph, lying low and occasionally playing the fool, the British genius lies in its profound capacity to mask and conceal genius. It is a deadly combination which has brought grief to many unsuspecting adversaries around the world.
To whom much is given much is also expected. It has been suggested that arising from the disproportionate economic advantages accruing to it as a result of colonization, the brutal expropriations of other people’s land, the internationalization of slavery and the global warming now threatening many nations as a result of the despoliation of the global fauna and fossils, Britain should give something back as a token gesture of remorse and regret for the atrocities committed.
But that will be the day. In the history of the modern world, no nation has ever given up its historic advantage except compelled by circumstances beyond its control. In a Darwinian world of the survival of the fittest, it is like asking your tormentors to go easy on you because you are also human. We are yet to find a name for this emergent syndrome. It is certainly not from Stockholm.
One of the charges against the late queen is that she soaked in the material riches and stupendous munificence arising from the colonial expropriation of other people without evincing any sympathy for the plight of the colonized. But what was she to do? Ask that the largest stone in the English crown which was the reward of colonial plunder in India be returned to the owner? She would have been summarily dethroned and sectioned.
It has also been hinted by the eternally naïve that King Charles will do the needful, given his emotional identification with the lowly, his forthright and outspoken outbursts against unmerited privileges and genuine concern about the terrible effects of climate warming.
But as the new king will soon discover, the boyish enthusiasms of pre-coronation must give way to the hardy sobriety of post-coronation. Any off-message rallying away from the script will attract instant reprimand from the real rulers of the land such as happened to his wayward and sybaritic great uncle, King Edward.
In the end and as Queen Elizabeth’s sterling career has demonstrated, old empires may change form like a snake casting off its slough. But they remain essentially the same. Even in its post-empire incarnation, the imperializing imperative remains and dominion is not a tea party.
It is up to those who feel oppressed to summon their inner reserves of creative enterprise to come up with countervailing centres of civilization just as the Chinese, the Indians, the Singaporeans, the Malaysians, the South Koreans and the Gulf Arabs have done. It is the reality of newer and more competitive versions of modern civilization that will compel Britain to face up to its own structural and political inadequacies rather than whining and throwing tantrums about colonial atrocities.
Here is wishing the great matriarch of Britain eternal repose.