I once – or it may have been twice – wrote to Eton College to ask about its History syllabus: mainly in order to find out what may have lain behind the version of British history presented in the Old Etonian Brexiter Jacob Rees-Mogg’s The Victorians: Twelve Titans who Forged Britain, published in 2019 to almost universal derision. I got no reply from Eton (surprise, surprise!); and so remained with only my suspicions of how it must have been; until I came across this memoir by another Old Etonian, which confirmed those suspicions to the hilt. It’s written by a man of Ugandan heritage, and is well worth reading for its unique account of how Eton appeared to someone who couldn’t be considered to be one of its normal (upper-class white) clientele. The book is One of Them, by Musa Okwonga, and is by no means as critical you might expect. But this passage on the British history he was taught at Eton told me all I needed to know. (And felt familiar to me, having been educated at a school which wasn’t a proper ‘Public’ one, but aspired to be.)

Here’s what he writes (around p.44).

“Given the importance of history, I find it interesting to reflect on what I was taught about Britain at school, as well as what I wasn’t. Upon leaving, if someone had asked me what I knew about the British  Empire, I would probably have told them that the country of my birth had long ruled the world through a heady mix of commerce and conquest. Had I been asked about the details of that conquest, my answers would have been uncertain. I wouldn’t have been able to tell them much, if anything, about Partition or the Opium Wars or the scramble for Africa or the trade of enslaved people, because I covered those pivotal historical events in little or no depth. I therefore grew up with a somewhat hazy sense of the British Empire; it was an edifice as distant grand and unknowable to me as the statues of Easter Island. The conflict in Uganda was already so protracted that there was little discussion of the colonial power that had destabilised my parents’ country long before and had given it its present-day form. But Britain’s imperial machinations were never lost on my grandfather, who once told me in an ominous tone – one that demanded no further clarification – The last man on Earth will be an Englishman.

“It is not as if I am not taught much about Britain. I learn about when Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror invaded the island and about when its barons forced the king to submit with the Magna Carta. I learn about the struggle to resist the influence of the Continent, its stand-off with the Vatican. I spend far more time studying Britain’s role in the end of slavery than its prominent role in promoting and profiting from this uniquely lucrative system of human suffering. In my view, my country was primarily the great liberator, not the cruel subjugator. I could reel off all kinds of facts about how terrifying the Vikings were, but if someone had asserted that the British could be similarly barbaric and on a far greater scale, then at first I might have been very defensive.

“The Britain about which I learn is either heroic abroad or beset by internal turbulence or doing its very best to repel external threats. My Britain is a victim and yet somehow ruling and never being enslaved; it is being free and then breaking further free; a plucky underdog or the victor of fair fights; a reluctant and dignified winner of the rough and tumble of global politics. My Britain is quiet and unassuming, yet somehow stumbled upon the possession of all this territory abroad, a bumbling traveller who wandered about the world and just happened to come home with the lion’s share of its wealth.

“The only time I examine the sustained savagery of which Britain has been capable is during one of my specialist subjects in my final year. Here I look at the First Crusade, whose harrowing climax – the slaughter of Jews and Muslims by Christians at the siege of Jerusalem – fundamentally reshapes the way I look at the Middle East. I begin to see that Britain is not an innocent actor in so many of these scenarios but a much more sophisticated player than I ever imagined.

“It will still be a few years until I find out what else Britain did – about the Amritsar massacre and the Bengal famine and the eviction of the people of the Chagos Islands and the suppression of the Mau Mau, many of whose resistance of British rule was punished by their castration with pliers. It will be even longer until I learn about Operation Legacy, the British government’s carefully orchestrated destruction of the bulk of the records of what it did in colonial times, so that the countries recently released from its rule would not know the extent of its deeds.”