Writing last month in African Leadership Magazine, she asked: “One of the things I am thinking about right now…is this a time for us once again to have some sort of race and reconciliation summit?”
She told The Telegraph: “The ministers are all saying this is an issue which we are going to have to deal with, and there is a lot of support. The debate doesn’t go away because you shove it under the carpet,” she said.
“These are not comfortable conversations but this is where the Commonwealth is great, because the people and countries involved are all on that journey. It’s not just talking to one side, we’re all the sides.”
She said something like Black History Month, held across the entire Commonwealth, could be another forum for the debate.
She stressed that the Commonwealth has had to confront race and equality ever since its inception. It was born as an association of equal states after the fall of the British Empire in the 1930s and 40s, as former colonies re-established themselves as independent nations.
Any summit would have to examine atrocities committed during the time of Empire, from slavery to Partition, the bloody division of British India into India and Pakistan ahead of Indian independence which displaced millions and saw up to two million killed. Massacres like the 1919 Amritsar massacre, in which 379 unarmed Indian civilians were shot by the British Indian Army, could also be addressed.
“We have never been frightened of having this conversation,” said Baroness Scotland. “You can’t say to young people don’t talk about this, don’t talk about colonialism, not about where we have been. It has never been for us black or white, rich or poor. This has been a conversation we had to have in order to create the Commonwealth.”
The Commonwealth also led the way in opposing apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s, Baroness Scotland, who was born in Dominica, said.
She said she remembered as a child watching the Soweto uprising in 1976, in which protests in South Africa led by black schoolchildren were brutally suppressed by police.
“I remember not understanding – why are they doing this? These kids look like me, and I was watching them get mown down,” she said.
“I wouldn’t have thought we’d be having this conversation in 2020, I didn’t think our kids would have to have these conversations, but if we don’t understand our history we are doomed to repeat it.”
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