November 29, 2019

How to properly refuse an award, by George the Poet

topic:	Colonialism
located:	United Kingdom, Uganda, Belgium, Democratic Republic of the Congo
editor:	Gurmeet Singh

Being selected for a British Honour is a paradox of the Bart Simpson kind: “you’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t”. Accept the honour, and accept all the ridicule and embarrassment that goes with it (if you don’t think ‘Sir’ or ‘Lady’ as titles are embarrassing, please have a quiet moment of reflection). But more interestingly, reject the honour, and you’ll be damned as arrogant, disrespectful, and if you’re a person of colour, you’ll be told to go back where you came from.

George the Poet (real name George Mpanga) revealed this week that he refused an MBE. An MBE (Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) is an order of chivalry and recognises contributions to the arts, sciences and charitable work. George, an immensely successful spoken word poet and podcaster explained that the award went against the reality of British colonial exploitation of his ancestral homeland, Uganda.

"I see myself as student, admirer and friend of Britain. However the colonial trauma inflicted on children of Africa, entrenched across our geopolitical and macroeconomic realities prevents me from accepting the title Member of the British Empire.

"The gesture is deeply appreciated, the wording is not. It will remain unacceptable to me until Britain takes institutional measures to address inter-generational disruption brought to millions as a result of her colonial exploits."

He went on to explain that he had no issues with other artists of colour accepting the award, and that he made his refusal with great respect for the U.K. but not for uncritical respect for the U.K.’s history.

Britain’s award system mirrors and recycles old colonial tropes and history. It’s perfectly valid for George the Poet to reject the award on this basis. It’s also clear he calls for deeper public understanding of Britain’s colonial past. In other words, this is not simply a case of an artist grandstanding. The poet Benjamin Zephaniah also rejected an OBE two decades ago on a similar basis, but in much angrier terms: “Me? I thought, OBE me? Up yours, I thought. I get angry when I hear that word 'empire', it reminds me of slavery, it reminds of thousands of years of brutality, it reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised.”

The real question is one of reparations. How to appropriately recognise and atone for crimes committed decades if not centuries ago? Writing in The New European with respect to Belgium and the Congo, the author Will Self this week wrote: “It can seem a sort of reduction ad absurdum to think about making reparations to the victims of colonialism, after all, how can it be fully and effectively estimated what any group of present-day people have gained from the exploitation any given group of those in the past? … Moreover, when we consider compensating living Africans for crimes of long-dead Europeans, how do we identify precisely who can be said to have done what, and to what precise extent?”

Self is right to point out that reducing the issue of reparations to money is riddled with issues: who gets what money, what for, how much, who should pay, why? It also seems to reduce the issue to the idea of ‘one-off gifts’. However, I would suggest that money is only part of the solution. The first step to effective reparations is recognition. Recognition that crimes were committed, that colonial expansion was wrong, and that this history has an ongoing legacy. Public education is a second step, as well as reforming various colonial institutions, including the giving of awards. Money delivered through means of concrete support for institutions of democracy and education in the former colonies is better than one-off gifts, and is even better than "foreign aid”. But money probably has to play a factor: it recognises in concrete form the depth to which countries were exploited and returns, in some belated form, the extracted gains from the former colony.

Finally, the issue of reparations should bring with it respect. Respect for the people of the former colony and its descendants. Respect for self-determination. Something Britain’s current Prime Minister, with his references to “watermelon smiles” and “Nigerian” avarice clearly does not have.

Image: GeorgethePoet.com

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