Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A lot is missing here, including the fundamental. When talking about protests or ‘revolutions’ the causes have to be highlighted.  The causes mentioned in the article are not causes by symptoms . There is not even a hint to the shared political economy/the dominant economic model and its operations from economic development to finance to debt to finance to unequal exchange. The protests are not new thus one should have a longer overview stretching decades and summed up in a couple of paragraphs, especially when an article is not a news item, one of ‘Big Question’ as the section is called. 

I have not read any Kenyan novel. This account is illuminating and encouraging to explore “East Africa’s leading novelist.” Sarah Jilani on Ngũgĩ’s vision

“We should contest and expose the Kremlin’s lying. But to suggest that the public assault on truth is new, or peculiarly Russian, is also disinformation .  Just as the Kremlin requires a campaign of disinformation to justify its imperial aggression in Ukraine, the  British empire  also needed a system of comprehensive lies.” Good. But I expected to also read about the contemporary lying machine not just the empire one.

Her country brutalised Africans

An Extinction Rebellion that cannot rebel. A Trade Union Congress that bows in front of class rule. An excellent article by Chris Hedges Related

  If the queen had apologized for slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism and urged the crown to offer reparations for the millions of lives taken in her/their names, then perhaps I would do the human thing and feel bad. As a Kenyan , I feel nothing. This theater is absurd. Criticism of British empire intensifies Related Dozens of staff at King Charles’s former residence told they could lose jobs

A new book by Caroline Elkins. A review “ With its enormous breadth and ambition, it amounts to something approaching a one-volume history of imperial Britain’s use of force, torture, and deceit around the world. As devastating as the details of these tactics are, even more damning is Elkins’s account of what she argues has been the persistent and perverse misuse of law to cast a veneer of justice and respectability over the remorseless exploitation of others. “As its title suggests, Elkins’s book argues that violence was not just an incidental feature of the British Empire, not simply its midwife, so to speak. Rather, it was foundational to the system itself, a fact borne out in considerable detail.” But Elkins’s “most original argument lies not in the violence itself but rather in London’s use and abuse of the notion of the rule of law, much touted by Britain as an elevating feature of modern Western civilization and a pillar of democracy. “ Elkins convincingly demonstrates that duri...

“ The apogee of the secret state in purposefully hiding information from the public in the postwar period was necessary for sculpting an official narrative about British imperialism and its war efforts divorced from the truth of its brutality. Imperialists were often all too aware that if the true nature of their mission was exposed it would also undermine the image of liberal democracy that was deployed to distinguish the West from authoritarian regimes.” State secrecy and destruction of historical records

Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes Related Many Brits know of the Russian gulag and Sozhenirsyn, but very little is taught about English atrocities. That ignorance shapes one's outlook at what is happening in the rest of the world and strengthens the belief that Britain is a good force in the world (philanthropy, aid ornganisations, charities, missionary celebrities , etc). Similar outlook can be found in France, Belgium and other countries. Excerpts from   Britain's Gulag – The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya   by Caroline Elkins

How a kidnapped aid worker who converted to Islam shook Italy

The history of the empire shows us not only that there is nothing especially “British” about values such as tolerance, freedom, human rights or democracy but that often what we call “British values” were influenced by both empire and resistance to empire. The oft-told story of a benevolent Britain “bestowing” freedom on her colonies when they were deemed ready for it is largely myth. In reality, resistance, often violent resistance alongside famous non-violent movements, was a central part of the story. From Insurgent Empire to Brexit

The rest of us knew Churchill was a villain

Universal Basic Income doesn't work

"The British curriculum dedicates plenty of attention to the violence of others - in Nazi Germany or during the American Civil War - and goes into great detail on a few events in medieval and pre-Victorian English history, like the Plague, the Great Fire of London, and the reign of Henry VIII. But a British school would not teach you anything about the brutality of British colonialism." It is time to teach colonial history in British schools

Educating Britain I have just read this book. The following excerpts are no replacement in reading the whole account. Excerpts From John Newsinger’s  The Blood Never Dried, A People’s History of the British Empire

Warning : do not read this if you are eating or about to eat, going to bed, or going to make love. This happened between 1952-1956, not in the nineteenth century. "Interrogation under torture was widespread. Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate women’s breasts. They cut off inmates’ ears and fingers and gouged out their eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated. Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound."  — Caroline Elkins, Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya , 2005 An update from Elkins...

The crimes of Winston Churchill I recommend Churchill's Empire by Richard Toye Britain's Gulag by Caroline Elkins

Behind China's $1tr plan to shake up the economic order

"This is the importance of Ngugi. Born in 1938, the son of a tenant farmer in rural, British-occupied Kenya, Ngugi grew up working the pyrethrum farms that were once the property of his ancestors. He came of age during the Mau Mau rebellion, followed by the Churchill government’s violent ​response, which included​ the detention of 150,000 Gikuyu people in concentration camps where they were electrocuted, whipped and mutilated. He vividly describes this period in his novels “ Weep Not, Child ,” the first East African novel published in English, “ A Grain of Wheat ” and “ Petals of Blood .” "Such a rich body of work [Wizard of the Crow] is of potentially tremendous importance to our understanding of how the world came to be as it is. Ngugi captures the progression from the raw plunder and violence of colonialism to the corruption of national Third World elites by the predatory forces of global capitalism, which he cheekily represented in “Wizard of the Crow” by the ...

The Crimes of Winston Churchill