I have been asked to help decolonise the curriculum
where I work. I take this to mean I must remove all subjects that benefitted
from colonisers or colonialism, all writers who were involved in or benefited
from the slave trade or indeed all books that nice people in 2021 should
disapprove of.
My first task is to remove all books in Latin, because
Latin was the language of Empire, colonisation and oppression. The Romans
colonised Britain and most of Europe and they owned slaves, indeed they
enslaved lots of Ancient Britons, though rather fewer Caledonians, for which
reason we ought to demand compensation from the Italians.
So out goes Virgil, Catullus, Augustine and Aquinas
and much of what was written prior to about 1800.
Next, I will remove all books in Scottish Gaelic. This
language descends from Middle Irish and only arrived in what is now called
Scotland because the Scotti colonised us. When the Scottish arrived in Scotland
from Ireland it is likely that they had slaves and oppressed and enslaved some
of the indigenous inhabitants of Scotland. For this reason, Scots should demand
compensation from Ireland for 1500 hundred years of occupation plus we should
demand reparations from each other for enslaving each other.
It’s worth remembering too that the people who built
Scara Brae and Stonehenge did not speak Celtic, so the Scotti, Iceni etc were
also colonisers, oppressors, enslavers and genocidal brutes.
However, it was not merely the Scotti who colonised
Britain, it was also the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, the Vikings and the
Normans. They too captured Ancient Britons and made them into slaves and worst
of all drove them westwards to occupy Wales. So, we will have to get rid of all
of the books written in the languages of these colonisers and their
descendants. Unfortunately, this involves getting rid of not merely the German
and Scandinavian books, it also necessitates getting rid of the French books
and worse still the English books. After all English is just a modern form of
the oppressor language Anglo-Saxon.
Greek was the language of the oppressor in Ancient
times being used to colonise from Iberia to Crimea. So that means we will have
to get rid of Homer, Plato and the New Testament.
Hebrew was the language of Moses when his people
colonised Caanan. So, I’m afraid the Old Testament will have to go too, not
least because other inhabitants of the region also have a long history of
enslaving, blinding
Should Israel from
Philistian yoke deliver;
Ask for this great
deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless in Gaza at the
Mill with slaves
Above all we must not be like the Philistines.
Russian will obviously have to go, not merely because
Russians owned slaves (serfs) until 1861 but also because the Russian Empire
expanded from Muscovy all the way to Vladivostok and colonised millions of
non-Russians in the process.
We don’t have that many Arabic books, but they will
have to go too after all Arabia spread its language and culture all the way
from Spain to Indonesia and certain rather well-known Arabians from history owned
slaves.
Unfortunately, the Confucius Institute and all of the
Chinese books they have given us are going to have to go. China colonised not
merely Tibet and Xinjiang and, in the process, set about eradicating the
indigenous languages and cultures there, it also colonised Taiwan and Inner
Mongolia. So, no more Chinese books for us.
Japan won’t fare any better having colonised Korea and
Manchuria.
By this stage we are left with a few books in Basque and
Polish. It seems impossible to find any other country that hasn’t colonised
someone else. But then I remember that Poland only exists because it was
originally colonised by the Slavs from Central Asia, so the Polish books have
to go too.
In order not to use the language of any oppressor the
first task will be to teach students a language of someone who hasn’t oppressed
anyone. Then we will translate all of the oppressor books that can still be read
without too much contamination of our new found purity. The task then is to
find a language that is completely decolonised.
The choice narrows down between Navaho, Basque and
Swahili. Our main problem is the limited number of people who speak both
Ancient Greek and Hebrew as well as Basque, Navaho and Swahili. But disaster
strikes. Having gone to great lengths to translate books into languages that
have not oppressed or enslaved anyone we discover that people who spoke these
languages have at various times owned slaves, moved to places that they were
not previously or replaced people who were there before. So, our great efforts
to speak Basque, Navaho and Swahili are for nothing.
We think about translating each book into a made-up
language such as Esperanto or Klingon, but we are faced with an apparently
insurmountable problem. How can we teach about scientific discoveries and
mathematical breakthroughs which came about because of people who benefited
from either slavery or colonisation? However perfect Newton might or might not
have been he could not have discovered what he did if Britain hadn’t colonised
and enslaved other people.
We are unable to use anything whatsoever from North or
South America, unless it is from Native Americans, but it turns out that even
Native Americans are not native, because their ancestors colonised North and
South America by walking across the land bridge which once connected Alaska
with Asia.
Perhaps if we turned to Africa for a place that had
never colonised anyone and which had only ever been a victim of slavery. But
unfortunately, we discover that the whole of humanity is descended from African
colonisers who spread from there to everywhere. Worse we discover that rather a
large number of Africans were involved in the slave trade and that African
Americans are more likely to be descended from slave owners like Thomas
Jefferson than any other Americans. This leaves the metaphorical descendants of
Jefferson and Sally Hemmings to claim reparations from each other and
themselves.
We find that those people in Britain most likely to
complain about colonisation have themselves colonised certain British cities by
replacing the indigenous people, culture and languages with their own. This is usually
called multiculturalism. But while the plantation of Ulster clearly oppressed
the Irish, did it not also bring with it multiculturalism? And if Protestants oppressed
in Ireland, why didn’t Catholics oppress in return when we had the plantations
of Glasgow and Liverpool? To be on the safe side we must remove books about all
of them.
Decolonising the curriculum continues until the last
vestige of oppression and repression is removed. All the tainted books are
piled up in front of the library. There is no more philosophy, no more
medicine, no more law, science, mathematics or indeed anything else that is
connected with colonies, colonisers or slavery.
As I look on the pile of burning books from the library,
I consider the three books that remain. No one was able to read them because
they used alphabets that to us were mere squiggles. One might be Georgian, the
other Greenlandic and the third Geʽez, but no one can be sure.
We have only a limited number of courses next year but
at least we have decolonised the curriculum.
