The Legacy of Empire: How to Reckon with the Past (Simukai Chigudu)

23:48Amol Rajan:This is me putting your enemy's position to you. Yeah, please. There's an awful lot of people. And it's worth saying that in a professorial way, you've always been willing. I looked it up before doing this interview. You've always been willing to engage in a really kind of generous, spirited way with people who take different positions to you. You know, this isn't some sort of, this is intellectual combat rather than anything else. The people who don't like statues being taken down are often, not always, but often people who feel that they belong in countries and cultures where the majority culture is not being, A, shown the respect it deserves.

24:24Amol Rajan:and B, they feel that their culture is somehow being erased. And these people feel aggrieved when they see the Super Bowl halftime show delivered in Spanish. They feel aggrieved when Winston Churchill has taken off the£5 note and they perhaps don't want the statue of Cecil Rhodes or indeed Edward Colston taken down and they don't want the statue of Churchill defaced in Westminster. What do you say to those people who feel Rhodes Must Fall is part of a campaign to deny majorities, in this country happen to be white, majorities, their history. Yeah, so I guess one is that I would say that we need to treat that anxiety seriously and with respect.

25:03So the idea of feeling that one's culture is under assault and the disorientation of being in a world where you think that your very being, your existence, everything that you were brought up with is now somehow morally wrong through no fault of your own. And to see that institutions that stand for continuity and stability capitulating to what feel like or what look like the demands of the moment from groups of people that one doesn't identify with. I mean, of course that's unsettling, you know. And I have enough respect for people who take a different side of this to see that. Where I would maybe complicate that argument is to say, for a start, I think the legacy of who Rhodes was is very poorly understood in the first instance, that most people know a very sanitized and...

26:07Whitewashed. Yeah, whitewashed version of the history, right? They know about the Rhodes Scholarship, and they know, and this came out, you know, during the Rhodes Must Fall period, People kept saying, well, he may have had some odious views, but he was a product of his time. And I think, hang on, the moment you get into a little bit of the historical record, you begin to, you know, tell a different story. For one, you know, I'm indifferent to his views. I mean, his views concretize or, you know, they make explicit certain things, but it was what he did. Like, I don't think that the scale of violence and atrocity that Rhodes committed, that he engineered, that he brought about is properly understood.

26:46We're talking about, you know, I mentioned the mass atrocity violence. He used a Maxim gun, which was the first firearm to automate its own recoil. You know, you're talking about 700 Debele people gunned down in one conflagration against Rhodes' army with one white person killed. These are people who were ambushed and being gunned down for their land. My grandfather was in a cave when he was a baby, hiding out from Rhodes' infantry, who were throwing dynamite to kill all men, women, and children as they encroached on this particular part of the Zimbabwean hinterland known as the Makoni District.

27:32When this happens, the Times, as the newspaper of record in the UK, publishes a series of articles expressing sheer disgust at the manner of this execution. Missionaries, priests, commentators are talking about the stench of human bodies. They're talking about the desolation and the mutilation of the natives. So, you know, people at the time were looking at empire and saying, wow, not in my name, not this, you know. And I think that's the bit of the history people don't know or reckon with. They know the sanitized version. Even something like Rhodes's bequests were in service of a kind of propaganda, a way of saying that, you know, the legacy will not be the record of what happened.

28:23It will be a way of saying that, you know, a way of claiming immortality. I mean, Rhodes's level of narcissism was kind of comic

28:33Amol Rajan:book villainy may i humbly put to you a further common objection to your position which is that the struggle for black liberation particularly the 20th century has largely been won and therefore the battles that you're fighting should really be fought not in britain but elsewhere yeah you write in the book page 151 it's very beautiful this you're right it was july 1974 and my mother's inward desire for self-liberation mirrored the cultural mood across africa for decades africans had been rejecting colonial rule and agitating for self-determination. In countries where the battles for freedom were yet to be won, as in apartheid South Africa, the struggle for political liberation birthed ideas such as black consciousness that sought to instill in black people pride and self-confidence.

29:18Amol Rajan:And what you're talking about there is a 20th century tradition that actually spanned much of the world. And people who've been a huge influence on me, not because I agree with them much, but people like Marcus Garvey, people like Malcolm X, people like James Baldwin, one of my heroes, people like Bob Marley, who is my hero, and my youngest daughter's named Nesta, which is what Bob Miley was born with. There was a black struggle in the 20th century, which some people would say, Simmukai Chigudu, in modern Britain, that struggle has been won. Black people can get elected to parliament. Black people can reach top jobs.

29:53Amol Rajan:What do you say to those people who say, if you're really concerned about empire and colonialism, you should be fighting for kind of greater rights in Africa today rather than modern Britain. I have many responses, as will not surprise you. So maybe I can just start by, you know, telling another story from the book about what it was like growing up in Zimbabwe, sort of born free. So by the year 2000, I'm in my second year of high school. and Robert Mugabe has been leading the ruling party known as ZANU-PF for about two decades now and for various reasons his popularity is declining. There are all sorts of accusations around authoritarian rule, around corruption, any number of scandals have hit the government And in a bid to revive his popularity, Mugabe takes a kind of populist, authoritarian, and hardline nationalist, jingoistic kind of line.

31:01So he starts to don military fatigues and goes out and speaks, you know, at these mass rallies saying that actually the war of liberation is not done. That as long as there is still land in Zimbabwe held by white farmers who may have inherited it either through Rhodesian colonial rule or bought it soon after independence before the government was able to rectify land inequality, Zimbabwe will never be free. We need to transfer this all into native black hands. What happens was he kind of sanctions militia and war veterans to occupy white-owned farmland. White farmers are booted out from the country en masse.

31:43The numbers go from about 4 ,500 white farmers in Zimbabwe to about 500 in just a few years. But the worst violence actually isn't directed at the white farmers. Now, to be sure, about 10 white farmers are violently killed. I do not sanction or condone that, but hundreds of thousands, over 200 ,000 black farm workers who worked for those white farmers suffer violent assaults because they're seen as sellouts, as kind of puppets of white imperialism. These are people who lose their homes, their livelihoods. Many of them lose their lives and are living in what is nothing short of a humanitarian catastrophe.

32:23I say that in the first instance to make the point that Zimbabwe's nationalist turn, this kind of hyper nationalism cloaked in the language of black struggle became jingoistic and self-cannibalizing.

32:35Amol Rajan:And you're not an unflinching supporter of all black struggles for liberation everywhere. Absolutely. Black struggle is a really complicated thing. But the other thing to say is that Britain is many struggles. Yeah. And Britain is heavily implicated in the Zimbabwean story. Right. One of the reasons why Mugabe was able to make this claim in 2000 about white owned farmland not having been redistributed is that Britain had promised that they would help to pay for Zimbabwe's redistribution of land after the country gained independence. It's widely known and well documented, but it was never put into the Constitution.

33:10And so when the new Labour government is elected in 1997, the Zimbabwean government writes to Tony Blair and to his cabinet and says, we have this outstanding issue of debt. Right. You owe us. You know, you said you would pay for this. We inherited colonial era debt, which is not legitimate. You said you would pay for this. Claire Short, who was the Secretary for International Development at the time, writes to the Minister of Agriculture in Zimbabwe, and she says that the new Labour government is cutting all of its ties to the colonial past, that it assumes no responsibility for what was done historically, and that her own roots are Irish and that the Irish were themselves colonized.

33:52Now, this was a profound misreading, A, of how recent this history was. The fact that Zimbabwe had held off on land reform because it didn't have the money and was expecting to be financed by Britain, that also Zimbabwe didn't move for land reform before South Africa gained a move to black majority rule and democratic rule after 1994 for fear of destabilizing the region. So there were all of these international pressures on the Zimbabwean government not to distribute land with a good faith understanding that Britain would come through. And Britain whitewashed its hands. And this created an opportunity for a figure like Mugabe to take this turn towards demagoguery.

34:32And part of what I'm saying is that we need to look at all of this in the run, that this history is, it's around and it's alive and it continues to do harm in the world. And so when I think about myself in Britain, my struggle is always multifold. You know, people here see me talking about roads must fall, but so much of my academic work is writing about Zimbabwe. And the book Chasing Freedom is about freedom everywhere. It's to say that, well, I'm part of a generation that still is feeling the loss and the disorientation of that past. Yes. Wherever we are in the world.

35:06Amol Rajan:And to give you forewarning, my final question, not, you know, that we've got a way to go, is going to be, have you found the freedom you've been chasing? But just when people look at you, some people look at you and they see, here's a guy, supremely well-educated, beautiful, beautiful, rasping English accent. He's an associate professor at Oxford University. He's having a wonderful time in this country. What's his beef with the country that's given him such a welcome home? And you would say, not just given him a welcome home, but given him opportunities. You would say that it's not a beef. You're asking people to understand history in its fullness, in its complexity, in its multifaceted nature, and in its incredibly complex texture.

35:44Amol Rajan:Absolutely. And, you know, you're right. I mean, I think I've had an unusual trajectory through the UK. You know, I moved to the UK, as I mentioned, at age 16. I had a bursary to go to a boarding school in Lancashire. I went to medical school after boarding school in Newcastle in the Northeast. I worked all over the Northeast as part of my training from Newcastle in Gateshead to Sunderland. I did my last exam in Middlesbrough. I had done rotations up in Northumbria. You're positively Northern. Yeah, I was there for six years. I then moved and worked in the NHS in Oxford, in Buckinghamshire and in Berkshire.

36:24I worked in public health in London, and then I became a professor at Oxford. So I have experienced so many of the key institutions of the UK. And I think that there is, if you like, a kind of insight that comes from this, right? Which is to say that, you know, I would affirm so much of what you've said, that this country has given me so many incredible opportunities. I'd never deny that. And at the same time, I recognize, too, I mean, just the sheer amount of racism and ignorance I've encountered each step of the way. I mean, working in, you know, as a medical student.

37:02Amol Rajan:Have you encountered a lot of racism? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the full gamut, it's different flavors. I mean, you know, Gary Young-Palfrey writes that racism is a language with many different dialects. And I've experienced many different dialects. So there's, you know, there's the overt stuff. There's being told to, you know, foxtrot Oscar back to Africa when I've been walking in the streets of Newcastle. There have been all kinds of things said about my skin color, the way I speak. You know, at some point at medical school, somebody said, you're the whitest black man I know. Now, if we give pause to that for a moment and think about what that means, you know, If you're saying that being well-educated and erudite makes you white, are you saying that all black people are ignorant and inarticulate?

37:54And so that's not necessarily racism of the violent and virulent kind that my father and my grandfather encountered by the Rhodesians, but it is a form of denigration and disrespect. Working on the wards in Sunderland, I was called things like a black bastard. Often, you know, with just no impetus, just like going about my business, filling out drug charts, prescribing paracetamol and things like that. So, you know, I think this stuff is...

38:22Amol Rajan:Everyday racism is still a fact of modern Britain, is it? I think it is. I think it is. And I think it unfolds in different parts of the country in different ways. and I think the problem I see in these public debates around colonialism and racism is that positions like mine become caricatured where people are like you're saying Britain's a racist country it's multicultural intolerant I'm like no all of these things can be true at the same time

38:54Amol Rajan:really hope you're enjoying my conversation with Simu Kaya Chigudu if you are please subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds. That way you will not miss future episodes. And if you do subscribe, make sure you've got your push notifications turned on and that way you will get an alert whenever we publish a new episode so you'll never miss out. Right, thank you so much. And now back to Simukai Chigudu.

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40:51Amol Rajan:Let's talk about some of the solutions. On decolonising the curriculum, is there an argument that it shouldn't actually be that controversial? So I'm older. I don't quite. I've always, you know, I've genuinely intellectually struggled a bit. I get the kind of deeper emotional currents. But decolonising the curriculum, if it was recast as expanding the curriculum, but in a very particular direction so that you didn't have a Eurocentric view of history, that seems to me not only kind of quite common sense idea, but also one that's got a long pedigree. I mean, if I think 20 years ago, one of my great experiences as an undergrad, I didn't go to quite as many lectures as I should have done.

41:29Amol Rajan:But the brilliant intellectual Edward Said came along and he wrote a book called Orientalism, which looked at sort of Victorian English novels and others and said, you know, they're guilty of a kind of West-centric view. and there was you know there was this attempt to move beyond the Eurocentric worldview which goes right back to the middle of the 20th century and before much more recently a colleague of yours in Oxford a brilliant brilliant historian Peter Frankopan has written a book called The Silk Roads which sold about 40 billion copies I know in which he sort of I mean it's a great it's a great book not taking anything away I read it it's brilliant he did an updated version called The New Silk Road but he essentially said there is another history which if you go that way a bit you know there's this alternative history isn't there an argument that decolonising in the curriculum should just be a reasonable, common sense, incremental evolution of what we have.

42:18Amol Rajan:Why is it so controversial? I think it's controversial because a lot of the debates that we have about education are not really about pedagogy and intellectual broad-mindedness. They're about who we are. They're about who we are and they're about cultural capital. They're about how education positions you in society, what doors and opportunities it opens up, and who gets left out. And there are many, you know, amazing things about, you know, teaching and working in a place like Oxford, and there are many, many difficult things. And part of it is that you're wrestling with these multiple mandates of like, you know, part of my job when I'm in the classroom is just to educate my students.

42:59But part of it is also operating in an institution that plays a crucial role in creating the elite of this country, you know. And I think when you start to talk about decolonizing the curriculum, you're not just expanding people's frames of reference, but you are challenging entrenched notions about who we are. You're also inviting people to ask a bunch of uncomfortable questions that if taken to their logical conclusion, begin to threaten the sort of self-preserving character of many traditional institutions. You know, so just again, to use Oxford as an example, you know, you start talking about decolonizing the curriculum at Oxford.

43:41Immediately, you're inviting people to start to see the feudal character of how the university itself is run and people to say, no, hang on a minute. You know, why are there this old college system and who does this protect? Who are the financial beneficiaries of this? Why is money so uneven? and how do we do admissions, you know. And so what starts out as reading, say, Orientalism or France for Non or whatever it might happen to be, can work itself into just having a more critical view of the world itself.

44:08Amol Rajan:So what would you say to someone like Catherine Birbel Singh, the head teacher of Michaela School in North West London? I actually listened to your episode with her. What did you make of it? Tell me. Because she said that spending enough time in the teaching profession took her from progressive views to small C conservative views. I actually think it's in a way better to understand her as a traditionalist. in relation to a knowledge-rich education and pedagogy rather than a sort of conservative as an active politician. But she would say you teach kids, and I've been to her school. Her school has, you know, the statistics for the results they achieve are quite extraordinary in terms of Progress 8, which is the sort of difference a school makes.

44:43Amol Rajan:The fact is, she says you teach people the best that's been thought and read. And that might well include stuff beyond the Western canon, but start with the Western canon because you live in the West. Yeah, so my reaction to hearing her views was, I mean, part of it was very recognizable to me in one sense, right? So I did my first four years of high school, you know, at a very elite school in Zimbabwe called St. George's College, you know, and we, you know, uniform was tightly regulated. We wore blazers and knee socks held up by garters. I think Catherine would have fitted right in. She would have fitted right in.

45:17You'd be quite happy there. It was very, very high rock. She would have approved. Yeah, it was very hierarchical. You know, when you get in in your first year, you're not allowed to walk on any grass. And then each year you accrue what they call a privilege, more lawns that you can walk on. Or if you perform particularly well, you know, you get more privileges. I mean, it was this, you know, model of school that came right out of an old, you know, British public school tradition implanted by, you know, into the colonies and left there. And so when she was talking, I recognized the sense of discipline, the sense of order, the respect for authority, all of those things.

45:56And I understand why that can have a powerful impact on young people cultivating or, you know, having boundaries and cultivating a certain type of carefully managed self-confidence. And that can have positive effects on education. Now, that being said, I think there were a number of things on which I substantively disagreed. And as I understood, you know, listening to her views, I think that she was tying some of those values to a particular kind of Britishness and tradition.

46:28Amol Rajan:Yeah, I suppose, I mean, Britishness is absolutely central to that school. You kind of, I don't think you vow allegiance to the country, but I think you might sing Gustav Holt's vow to the country. It's that sort of thing. And you sort of recite Rudyard Kipling's if as you're kind of walking into the language. Right, right, exactly. Yeah. And so I think that there are many different ways to be British. And that is a version of it. And I don't think it has a monopoly on what it means to be British. And I think that, you know, one can maintain a certain ethos of hard work, politeness, discipline, order, that I don't think is necessarily what has to be steeped in the content of the ideas of this narrow version of Britishness, right?

47:11that I think one can have a much more expanded or broader view. And as you say, if we're trying to understand the best of what's being written and thought, that also means we have to be inquiring and expansive enough in our frames of reference to even make that evaluation. And that begins with the exposure that we give people about, you know, what the world is and how we situate Britain within it.

47:32Amol Rajan:And there is this very useful distinction between form and content, isn't there? Because as you say, politeness, discipline, respect for authority and teachers, that's all sort of form. You can still teach them different things, right? Exactly. Mindful as I am of all the complexities, the texture of what you've talked about, the fact that you treat things in a kind of sweet, generous way. It's almost like you don't actually believe in universal theories. You're very keen to understand particular histories and particular individuals for their particular controversies. Where do you stand on the broad issue of the case for reparations?

48:09Amol Rajan:Complicated thing, because reparations for what, to whom, which slave trade are we talking about? But this all kicked off a little bit 12 years ago when a brilliant writer in America called Tyler Hesey, who wrote a piece for the New York Times called The Case for Reparations in 2014, and then it was revisited. It's a complex, practical issue. Where do you stand on it as an idea? Where I stand on it is in favour for two big reasons. One is that historic wrongs, just as a form of moral injury, you know, warrant our attention and warrant our sense of like, you know, how do we heal from harm? But the other is also about how historic wrongs live on today, how they have a kind of how they create certain path dependencies and contingencies that this thing happened then.

48:54And it's easy to dismiss it as having happened a long time ago. Colonialism, slave trade. But, you know, one of the things that I try to show in the book, because the book takes this really broad time scale, you know, and it does these sort of cross chronological leaps going as far back as 1874, right up to the present moment. But through my family's life, you know, you start to see a historic process of colonization that are like distant and abstract working their way into our lives through things like education, through things like the crisis that gripped Zimbabwe, through things like the violence and then the trauma that follows and how that poisons from one generation to the next.

49:37And I think a model or a version of reparative justice is partly material, you know, and I think in the case that Coates is making, I think there is a strong argument within the United States about the kind of the material reparation, you know, the redistribution of wealth, the redistribution of property and goods because of reparations. But then I think there's also just the ethos of it, reparative justice in educational institutions and how we teach about the past, reparative justice in terms of our public memorials, reparative justice in terms of acknowledging wrongs and harm done.

50:11Amol Rajan:People listening to this who are against reparations or who might even think of themselves as kind of moderates or conservatives might be interested to read a piece in the New York Times by, in fact, he's just left the New York Times, but he's called David Brooks, really acclaimed, thoughtful, brilliant writer. And he's a small C conservative. And in, I think, 2019 or 2020, he revisited Coates' 2014 essay. Yeah. And he said that he'd become a reluctant convert to the case for reparations. And he talked about the practical difficulties in modern America. You know, I think he said, do you give money to Oprah and LeBron Jane?

50:44Amol Rajan:Right, right, right. What happens to them? The answer is you don't. And how do you measure reparations? You know, who does it go to? From whom? Many, many, many different empires had slaves. So do they all do this kind of thing? Or is it just the enlightened liberals of the West that get to do it? But one of the arguments that he kind of entertains, having been against reparations instinctively is I think the one used by your, I don't dare to call him your colleague, your fellow Oxford professor, Nigel Bigger, who's written about this at length. And they say, first of all, the British Empire ruled the world in an age of empires.

51:24Amol Rajan:And compared to other empires, it did less harm and more good. That's one argument. Second thing is the UK was actually at the forefront of abolishing slavery. Third argument is you shouldn't, You're nodding. You've actually studied this. Okay. But the third argument is that the danger with reparations, as with apologies for slavery and Tony Blair saying we regret it and King Charles saying sorry and so forth, is that it treats history as a kind of therapy. What do you make of those arguments? A, that the British Empire wasn't as bad as others, that Britain had a role in ending slavery, and thirdly, that history is not therapy.

52:01Amol Rajan:Sure. so British Empire wasn't as bad as others I mean I given where we started out that's going to be a mad place for you to be invited to go I just I mean it is a very popular it's worth saying a lot of people use that argument Neil Ferguson wrote an entire book called Empire and it was one of his central points if you're going to be colonised by someone historically and this is literally their argument it would have been useful to be colonised by the Brits yeah I mean there are so many different ways of countering that. I mean, one is to say that like, something being wrong, but not being as bad as other things that were wrong, doesn't take away from the thing that was wrong in the first place, right?

52:42Like, that may be the case. Like, I mean, I think, you know, you look at the Belgians' heinous record. To King David Paul II. Exactly, in the Congo. I mean, the pogroms that they waged and they staged, you think about the French in Algeria, the Portuguese in Mozambique and Angola, you know, the European empires are guilty of a great many sins and horrors, and actually think they should all be taking on a very serious project of decolonization and reparative justice, okay? I don't think that, depending on how you account for this, I don't think that the claim that Britain was less bad than others is particularly relevant.

53:23The other thing I would say is it's not at all obvious that, you know, the Fergusonian version of this argument that, you know, if you were to be colonized, it's better to have been colonized by the British than other empires. I think that that's a tricky claim to make. I just don't know how you would arrive at that kind of conclusion. And partly because of how do you, one is that there is such masking of the true harm that was committed during the British Empire, but also just like what it's like long afterlife is, in part because the British Empire went on for so long and is implicated in forming so many institutions around the world, many of which have kind of locked in or entrenched forms of inequality that like you know drawing a neat causal line is incredibly difficult to do so i just don't really buy that argument kind of

54:17Amol Rajan:morally or empirically what would you like to see happen now to redress some of these historical injustices um and to set us all on a common path to a better future so um i'm going to just pick various examples that sit behind, I think, a lot of the principles that we've been talking about. For one, I mean, we were discussing statues and iconography and so on. One of the things that frustrated me about the Rhodes Must Fall debacle and responses to it is that I just thought so many people were just showing a very limited imagination of what's possible, right? Like, my position was, you know, if you take down the statue, for instance, and put it in one of Oxford's storied museums, but create a really interesting exhibition that is at once about the history of Rhodes and Rhodesia, but that is also an exhibition about Rhodes Must Fall.

55:15You're telling this wider complicated story of how do people kind of relate, how did colonialism unfold and how do people relate to the colonial past. You know, it can be this...

55:26Amol Rajan:And that argument is what history is. And that is what, yeah, exactly. And I'm like, and that can be really fascinating because you can have all sorts of different artifacts to that end. You can have the statue itself. You can have the placards and the protests that people held up because that's a moment in time that tracks, you know, what is the conversation that the world and this university, this community is having. And you can bring all of these into a broader discussion about, you know, what is it that brings about social change? I think there's, you know, we've kind of been talking about reparations.

56:01I mean, one area in which we see this happening is about, you know, returning artifacts from, let's say, the British Museum or elsewhere to their places of origin. And I think, again, there's imaginative work to be done about custodianship and capacity and institution building, you know, to keep the focus on Africa for a moment. There are so many African curators, custodians, academics, scholars who would love to be able to showcase and display the riches of their history, you know, on the continent as forms of public pedagogy. There are exchange programs one can do. I mean, I just think that we just need a little bit more positive energy and imagination about this.

56:42Same thing goes for the curriculum. I mean, I think we need to be decolonizing the curriculum, not only at university level, but right down to primary and secondary school, that the British story is a fascinating one. And what makes it most compelling is not a kind of stylized or static account of, you know, people in kind of with wig hair and that sort of thing who, you know, had multiple wives, but really saying, well, what is it that's made global Britain, the good and the bad? And how do we come to understand what the society is now, and all of its fractures and frictions? Simakaya Chiguru, what a pleasure to talk to you.

57:25Amol Rajan:Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Amal.

57:33Amol Rajan:It is always the case, it is always the case when you talk to people involved in protest movements that they have given more thought to that movement and to that protest than the reductive slogans offer. It's just in the nature of slogans that if you see and hear the words roads must fall, you'll think instinctively it's about people who above all want to tear things down. Actually, I learned, I hope you learned a huge amount in that conversation about the complexity of what the people behind that campaign were calling for. And that's not to say that I agree with it necessarily. But first of all, roads must fall is itself a phrase, is itself a slogan that has a long history in the 20th century.

58:12Amol Rajan:Secondly, the people who wanted to bring that statue down outside the front edifice of Oriel College in Oxford weren't looking to tear it down in the manner that that famous statue of Saddam Hussein came down at the end of the Second Gulf War. They want to move it to a museum, probably within Oxford, where it could be part of a broader exhibition which explains all of the context. And in all of the discussion I just had with Simakai, a guy who's, let's be honest, He's had an extraordinarily interesting life and there's real emotional raw energy and power in his memoir. It's called Chasing Freedom and I get the impression he's not quite found it yet.

58:49Amol Rajan:But in all that he's talking about, I got such a consistent feeling that what he's trying to do is expand people's learning, not to conceal things or disguise things. Yes, there's a moral fervor to what he argues. Yes, there's a kind of polemical energy. Yes, there's a radical spirit. But he is basically on the side of pedagogy. He wants people to know more, to learn more, to understand more about the complexity of modern history. And I think it's quite hard to argue against that, even if you take against some of his specific and, yes, radical positions when it comes to decolonising the curriculum or the case for reparations.

59:25Amol Rajan:That's it for now. Simukai will be answering your radical questions in our bonus Q &A episode on Monday. In the meantime, can I recommend this week's episode of Political Thinking with Nick Robinson? Because he is joined by the Green Party leader, Zach Polanski. For Zach Polanski's first interview, his debut on that podcast, they discussed Polanski's career in acting, his Jewish identity and the green surge in British politics. Just search for Political Thinking with Nick Robinson on BBC Sounds. I'll speak to you next week. Goodbye.

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