Colin Samson - The Colonialism of Human Rights

Some people have read whole chapters of my book, and I owe much to the insights they provided me. Øyvind Ravna of the University of Tromsø not only taught me a lot about treaties and international law, but also read Chapter 5and gave me valuable feedback. Nawel Hamidi, a Ph.D. student at the University of Essex, read Chapter 4, providing expert guidance on the continuous histories of colonialism in Algeria. Stephen Small of the University of California at Berkeley thoroughly read, commented on and gave me new ideas on Chapter 3. Conversations with Lydia Morris, my colleague at Essex, helped a lot with understanding and applying the concept of civic stratification. Exchanges with many others were equally valuable: Andrew Fagan, Director of Human Rights at Essex, on the political positions in the human rights community; Rob Schehr of Northern Arizona University on social justice in the USA; my colleague Carlos Gigoux on US intervention in Latin American politics; my former Ph.D. student Liz Cassell, on colonial law; my colleagues Jason Sumich and Afia Afenah on the democracy – economic growth links in Africa; Pierrot Ross-Tremblay of the University of Ottawa on the concept of cultural obliteration; and my partner, Nicola Gray, on the contemporary arts and colonialism.

For almost twenty years, I have taught a module called ‘Colonialism, Cultural Diversity and Human Rights’. The students taking it have motivated and encouraged me, and all have contributed something to this book. I would like specially to thank Passent Moussa and Malika Irshad for showing me how pervasive colonial laws are in formerly colonized territories. The University of Essex Sociology department gave me time, space and support to complete the book. Lastly, librarian Sandy Macmillan ordered every single book I needed, and even came up with many that I hadn’t thought of.

As a white person, I have been privileged. This is so although I had no privileged upbringing in any conventional sense of the word. Born of an unknown US enlisted serviceman and the teenage daughter of an elderly farm-labouring couple, mine was not a childhood for which there were many templates. I remember the Americans who came up our lonely stretch of road lined with Scotch pines on the edge of the Norfolk Fens to see my mother. They drove their Chevvies and Fords to a cottage without electricity or plumbing, and then later when the landowner got my grandparents on the housing list, they came to see my mother in our council house in a nearby village. Many visitors were brown and black, friends to my mother’s various white boyfriends. To a child grappling to understand the world, they were friendly and fun and I soon got used to the fact that Americans all looked different.

One day, a great-uncle known for his sporting and ribald humour was in conversation with a black airman in our living room. What he said to the airman stopped the talking just for a second. There was a pause after the short, nasal-voiced elderly man exclaimed: ‘Of course, a 100 year ago, you buggers were all slaves.’ It must have been hurtful to the airman, even though he had probably heard similar in his life. As a child of about 7, I didn’t know what he meant. It was probably a digression in a story, which was the main form of communication among older East Anglians. Over the years, my grandmother would remember it to me as she relayed episodes of her life with each visit I made back to the village. I laughed with her, but didn’t know whether it was the great-uncle or the airman or the sentiments that we were laughing at.

Some years later, I got a US military loan to attend the London School of Economics (LSE) for a Master’s degree. On weekends, I returned to the village to stay with my grandmother. She virtuously made vegetarian adaptations of meals that I remembered as a child before my adolescence had been punctuated by migration. My mother, sister, Texan stepfather and I went off in 1969 to an air base in California, and then to apartment complexes in Arizona populated by white drifters like we had become. When I saved money to return to England several years later, I liked the contrast of being around my grandmother and childhood friends in the village. They made me think that, despite years outside the desert city of Phoenix, and despite being unplaceable within British class taxonomy, I was still somehow English. In those days, I used to go to the pub my grandfather once frequented and got into conversations about politics with a wealthy landowner. When I defended decolonization – it was 1981 and the time of the transition to African majority rule in Southern Rhodesia – the dapper, well-mannered man some twenty years my senior calmly asked me which African countries were better-off now that the British had withdrawn. Having the bulk of my education in Arizona, and not being exposed to regular international news bulletins like my more solidly British and middle-class fellow students at the LSE, I had no answer. I had no facts on which to pin any kind of response. I did not immediately connect the corruption and strife in much of Africa with what the colonists had left behind. The virtue of the British just hung there.

Conversations with the jocular great-uncle and the snappily dressed landowner were just two of the incidents I remember that made me question who I am and with whom I stand aligned in the unequal world I was born into. The sense of moral integrity of white people who must in some way reckon with slavery and colonialism puzzled me. Thinking about it now, it seemed that my great-uncle was saying that slavery was nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, it was the black airman who should feel shame. Similarly, colonial rule, whether under Ian Smith’s Rhodesian apartheid government or otherwise, was not just benign but it improved the lot of Africans. Their subsequent descents en masse into poverty, war and corruption were an inevitable consequence of their own failings. Africans should be grateful to the British, and perhaps even petition for the return of an Empire that once controlled about a quarter of the globe. The credit for unselfish progress is borne by the nation itself, and the insults to others, the presumed beneficiaries, is merely the reverse side of the same coin. White privilege is – or at least it has been until recently – the ability to be cocooned in a virtue so unquestioned that others can be condescendingly dismissed, denounced and despised without repercussion.

Over the centuries, national pride and moral authority have been derived from the equation of Western civilization with liberal virtues such as human rights. Despite the many situations in everyday life in which white privilege – or, more properly, white dominance – is manifest, 1original rectitude has remained a deeper underlying sensibility of many white people. Until recently the privileges, which often translate into differences in how people are treated, have been submerged by a discourse in which ‘progressive’ Western principles are globalized, administered by governments and declared to apply equally to all. Many of those adhering to liberalism have refrained from insults to those regarded as their beneficiaries – now, these are only the preserve of populists – and have envisioned a world of rights scraped clean of slavery and colonialism. This perspective is displayed in human rights discussions, scholarly and official. According to Karima Bennoune, UN Special Rapporteur on Cultural Rights, universal human rights are a ‘basic tenet of international law’. This is so fundamental that there can be ‘no second-class citizens’ she said. 2

While the UN is outwardly unambiguous about universal human rights, it has of course committed human rights offences, among them the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia causing 500 ‘second-class’ civilian deaths. 3By contrast, states that are charged with enforcing human rights are more equivocal, proclaiming rights that their actions often deny. American Defense Secretary General James Mattis spoke of ‘the unwavering respect for human rights’ of the USA and larger international community in relation to the state-authorized murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. 4Mattis made these commitments in Bahrain where, a year earlier, the leading human rights advocate in the country had been jailed, the only independent newspaper was closed by the government, death penalties had been meted out after forced confessions, and access to the country had been denied to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Special Rapporteur for Torture. 5A few months later, the President whom Mattis served reiterated his support for the Saudi regime that ordered the killing of Khashoggi, a US resident and critic of the Saudi autocracy, citing billions of dollars in Saudi investments in US companies as a rationale. 6Since this time, the US Congress has blocked the sending of arms to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf autocracies, but this was easily sidestepped through a Presidential veto in July 2019.