Sometime in my early childhood, I saw the 1964 film Zulu. For years afterward, I remained captivated by its scenes of red-coated British soldiers fighting thousands of spear-wielding Zulu warriors. On a purely technical level, Zulu is one of the most well-made war films of the period, and it received high acclaim from critics. It reenacts, somewhat accurately, the 1879 Battle of Rorke’s Drift, in which a small British regiment successfully defended a missionary station against a Zulu attack. Under the leadership of handsome lieutenants, played in the film by Sir Stanley Baker and Sir Michael Caine, the vastly outnumbered British repel wave after wave of Zulus, defending the outpost and ultimately winning the Zulus’ respect.

When I saw this film as a child, I thought the red jackets were heroic and cool, and I recreated the lead characters with LEGO bricks. (At the time, LEGO sold an “Imperial Outpost” featuring what appeared to be British troops stationed in the Caribbean. It was my favorite LEGO set.) I identified with the British, of course, as the audience is expected to, since the film is told from their perspective. It did not for one moment cross my mind that there could be anything wrong with the film, nor did I stop to wonder why I wanted to play with the LEGO Imperial Guards rather than building, say, a LEGO Zulu Kingdom. The notion of what an empire was, or why it existed, did not enter my 7- or 8-year-old head. 

Now that I’m an adult, Zulu is horrifying to me, and I’d find it just as hard to rewatch for pleasure as I would find watching a propaganda movie from the 1940s Nazi film industry. In the movie, there is no context for the Zulus’ attack on the British. Our red-coated protagonists act purely defensively, and the film shows them as the underdog, since they have so few soldiers. They are simply trying to stay alive, and the outpost is a Christian mission, noble of purpose and harmless. As an adult, I know more context. The British were trying to take over Zululand, after manufacturing a pretext for war. British statesman Sir Theophilus Shepstone had warned in 1877 that “Zulu power is the root and real strength of all native difficulties in South Africa.” Shepstone warned of the pernicious influence of Zulu king Cetshwayo, writing that he “is the secret hope of every petty independent chief hundreds of miles from him who feels a desire that his colour shall prevail, and it will not be until this hope is destroyed that they will make up their minds to submit to the rule of civilisation.” The British defeated the Zulus, annexed Zululand, and deposed Cetshwayo. 

It has been debated whether or not Zulu is pro- or anti-imperialist. The New York Times’ critic certainly saw it as firmly pro-British, recommending it by saying that “if you're not too squeamish at the sight of slaughter and blood and can keep your mind fixed on the notion that there was something heroic and strong about British colonial expansion in the 19th century, you may find a great deal of excitement in this robustly Kiplingesque film.” I don’t think there can really be any doubt that the film is pro-imperial propaganda, even if the filmmakers weren’t conscious of their bias. As Phil Morris writes in the Wales Arts Review, while Zulu contains “occasional sideswipes at the savagery of colonial war,” it nevertheless presents

both the British soldiers and Zulu warriors as victims of a one-off historical happenstance over which neither had much control. They appear to fight each other reluctantly, yet bravely—indeed as ‘fellow braves.’ The reality was genocide. Zulu is not an anti-war film, nor truly is it a historical epic, it is a cavalry western in the old Hollywood style, in which white men kill indigenous people in order to steal their land. […] Cetewayo’s political aims and emotional ties to his country remain unexplored, a mystery, they are unimportant to the screenwriters and film-makers. The voiceless grievances of the Zulus—who, let us not forget, have had their lands invaded by the British—loom in ominous silence over the film. No one appears interested in why they are fighting or why they have to be killed. 

Many aspects of what we might call the “imperial mentality” are on display in Zulu. An offensive campaign (murderous conquest of an indigenous population) is portrayed as defense against attack. The British in the film are portrayed as people who have done nothing wrong. They are also portrayed as triumphing over impossible odds, despite the fact that the British had modern firearms while most of the Zulus were armed with javelins. (The British killed approximately 350 Zulus at the battle and executed any wounded Zulus they found. The British lost 17 men, and 15 were wounded.) The filmmakers made a few scanty efforts to pay tribute to the Zulus (Cetshwayo is played by a real-life descendant), but the film’s empathy is massively lopsided. Showing a certain symbolic respect for the enemy while exterminating them ruthlessly is also a classic feature of the imperial mindset; Thomas Jefferson was an admirer of the “noble savages,” for instance, while being determined to expel them from territory the U.S. intended to occupy.

The feature of imperialism that most fascinates me is its propaganda, the way the domination of others is presented as somehow good or benign. It’s no simple task. If you are butchering people and taking their land, how is it possible to spin it? You can avoid discussing it, but what do you do to actually justify it? But as Edward Said wrote, the mechanisms of justification are elaborate, and empires come up with ways to explain themselves: 

Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest [civilizing mission].

There seem to be no limits to the kinds of colonial atrocities that can be presented as just. In 1847, as the Irish (then part of the U.K.) were dying by the hundreds of thousands during the Great Famine, Charles Trevelyan, the British official in charge of overseeing famine relief, called the catastrophe the “direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful providence,” which would, in the words of historian Piers Brendon, “civilize the Irish.” The London-based Economist did not see the famine as a horror, but as the market meting out justice, and said that “it would be a neglect of a great duty which is imposed on us at this time” if the magazine did not blame the Irish for their own misfortune. As Peter Behrens writes, Britain saw it as

…a necessary evil: a harsh but efficient solution to Irish overpopulation and disorganization, and the laziness supposedly inculcated by overdependence on the too-easy-to-cultivate potato. From London’s point of view, Ireland needed the taut discipline of a rigorously maintained free market—and a couple of million fewer Irish.

Thus even though the colonial administration’s inaction caused one of the worst instances of preventable death in history, Trevelyan received a knighthood for his role in the catastrophe. 

In the last few years, a raft of books have exposed the dark side of the British Empire, including Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland (and follow-up Empireworld), Caroline Elkins’s Legacy of Violence, Akala’s Natives, and Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire. One of the most basic takeaways from these works is that the British Empire was, in fact, an empire, meaning that it consisted of a small caste of rulers forcibly ruling over a large swath of territory whose indigenous inhabitants were deprived of the basic right of self-government. It is extraordinary that this obvious, simple fact should need any discussion, but as Sanghera notes, for many generations of British schoolchildren, almost nothing was taught about the Empire. The history of, say, British rule in Barbados or Kenya or India was simply not part of a standard education. As a result, Sanghera writes, there has been an “enormous gap between what British people think empire did to the world and what the world knows empire did to the world.” 

Given how little is left of the Empire (the British Overseas Territories now consist of 14 scattered islands, none of which has more than 100,000 people on it), it will seem more and more incredible that “Britannia” could have ever “ruled the waves” as it did. The empire, at its peak, covered about 25 percent of the world and a similar percentage of the world population. An empire so vast is not attained, or retained, through gentle methods. British historian Hugh Edward Egerton declared in 1914 that, rather than conquest, “what happened was peaceful occupation of, apparently, vacant lands, though afterwards, no doubt, trouble sometimes arose from the neighborhood of aboriginal Indians.” As Elkins shows, this was entirely false. 

Elkins shows what George Orwell described in his famous essay “Shooting an Elephant” as “the dirty work of Empire at close quarters,” that is, keeping the “natives” in line and preventing self-rule from breaking out. Some instances of this became infamous, such as the suppression of the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica, or the Sepoy rebellion of 1857, or the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919. But in Britain, it was nevertheless widely believed that the Empire was relatively benign compared with others, or even that it was some kind of gift to the world. It was maintained that the Empire was good for its subjects even when all of those subjects were treated with outright racist contempt and imperial viceroys had absolutely no interest in finding out what their subjects conceived “their own good” to be. British colonial elites were averse to adopting any aspects of “native” culture, and were firm in their belief that a people was “civilized” to the extent that it emulated the British. A tract like 1863’s The Negro’s Place in Nature expressed typical prejudices: Africans had “no art,” and were “indolent, careless, sensual, tyrannical, predatory, sullen, boisterous, and jovial.” (It didn’t matter that there were outright contradictions in here, such as “sullen and jovial.”) There was “no idea of a naked savage being ‘a man and a brother,’” as Brendon quotes a commentator of the 19th century. The result of dehumanization is that violence simply doesn’t seem to matter very much. One colonial governor in Australia said that whites talked about the “individual murder of natives, exactly as they would talk of a day’s sport, or of having to kill some troublesome animal.” 

Shashi Tharoor notes the widespread belief that “the British may have been imperialists who denied Indians democracy, but they ruled generously and wisely, for the greater good of their subjects,” or in Emperor Joseph II’s formulation “everything for the people, nothing by the people.” This is difficult to square with the death toll from the “colonial holocausts,” as Tharoor refers to the famines that ravaged British India, which are “right up there with some of the most harrowing examples of man’s inhumanity to man in modern times.”

I am not inclined to fill the pages of this magazine with the accounts of the endless grisly atrocities that occurred when the British ruled over huge swaths of the Earth, from the Tasmanian genocide to the concentration camps of the Boer war to the totalitarian cruelty of the slave system in the Caribbean to the forced imposition of the opium trade on China to the suppression of the Arab revolt in Palestine and the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. Interested readers can consult Elkins, Tharoor, Brendon, and Sanghera. The pageantry of empire was designed to conceal, in the words of Lord Salisbury, “the nakedness of the sword upon which we really rely.” Of course it was ruled by the sword, because people generally do not like to be governed by strangers who treat them as ignorant children. (Lord Curzon said that “there were no Indian natives in the Government of India because among all the 300 million people of the sub-continent, there was not a single man capable of the job.”)

We should study the British Empire today because its history demonstrates human beings’ fantastic capacity for self-delusion. Noam Chomsky notes that John Stuart Mill, having written powerful tracts on both logic and liberty, was one of the most rational and freedom-loving intellectuals of his day. Yet even Mill, who had worked in the East India Company, was entirely hypocritical when it came to applying his libertarian principles to India, claiming that British rule was “angelic” and lamenting the “obloquy” heaped upon Britain by those who didn’t understand that it tyrannized over Indians for their own good. If even Mill, whose writings were elsewhere filled with humane and thoughtful paeans to human freedom, could justify something so horrendous as the empire, we should all be wary of the possibility that we may be unwittingly siding with an oppressive government or rationalizing indefensible acts. 

The excuses for the British Empire, such as the claim that Britain built wonderful railroads and freed the enslaved, are feeble, and writers like Tharoor and Sanghera make short work of them. They are clung to in part because it is difficult to admit that one’s country was on the “wrong side of history” and that what was felt to be an act of charity and benevolence was in fact a terrible crime. I am struck, looking back on Zulu, by how easy it was for me as a child to accept without question the idea that my people must be the heroes of the situation simply because they were the heroes of the film. Was Michael Caine not dashing? Were the British not outnumbered? 

The British Empire is dead. The sun finally set on it. Britain’s monarchy is decrepit, and it will never again “rule the waves.” (Let’s hope not, at least.) But a large percentage of the British population still believes that there was something good, rather than shameful, about tyrannizing over a huge percentage of the world’s population. Honest history writers are doing their best to correct that mistaken impression. But for those of us outside of Britain, the frightening level of arrogance and self-deception that the makers of empire possessed offers a crucial lesson. For the British, it was almost impossible to see themselves from the perspective of the Zulus. For the Founding Fathers, it was almost impossible to see themselves from the perspective of the indigenous American population. Even today, many Americans find it difficult to grasp that figures we admire were in fact genocidaires. The imperial mentality sanctions some of the worst imaginable crimes in the name of progress, enlightenment, and civilization. It is a terrifying, severely flawed mindset that allows people to justify repeated acts of violence. To decolonize the mind is therefore an urgent task.