We shouldn’t be afraid of calling Churchill a racist

Typographic portrait of Winston Churchill by Juan Osborne. Creative Commons licence.

In December 1954, just a few months before he finally retired from Number Ten, Winston Churchill held a meeting with a visitor from Kenya. His guest was Michael Blundell, a prominent white settler, who was treated to an impassioned exposition of the Prime Minister’s views on the then-ongoing Mau Mau uprising.

Time and again Churchill urged negotiation, arguing that the Kikuyu people were not primitive, stupid and cowardly, as was often thought. Rather, “they were persons of considerable fibre and ability and steel, who could be brought to our side by just and wise treatment”. Churchill also deplored British brutality against the Kenyan rebels and the fact that so many of the local population were locked up in detention camps, before offering his views on race relations.

He was old-fashioned, he said, and “did not really think that black people were as capable or as efficient as white people”. All the same, “If I meet a black man and he’s a civilised educated fellow I have no feelings about him at all”.

By this stage, the ailing Churchill had relatively little influence on events on the ground in Kenya, but the episode is highly revealing of his complex attitudes on race and Empire. He emerges from Blundell’s account of the discussion as a holder of racist views but not as an imperial diehard.

He comes across in his plea for peace talks as a thoughtful visionary, but also, in his description of the formerly “happy, naked” Kikuyu, as curiously naïve about the realities of imperialism. Equally striking was his unashamed belief in white superiority. This conviction did not, for him, diminish the need to act humanely towards supposedly inferior races that might, in their own way, be worthy of admiration.

That said – although he paid lip service to the importance of ‘native’ welfare – it was scarcely his highest priority. Thus, he was prepared to privately question the conduct of a dirty colonial war, yet was also, in the end, willing to assure its supporters of his backing.

Churchill’s overt and explicit racism is undeniable. He loathed “people with slit eyes & pig-tails”, though he reserved even greater hatred for Indians, whom he described as “a beastly people with a beastly religion”. (He meant Hinduism.)

The time that he had spent in India as a young soldier had left its mark. “When you learn to think of a race as inferior beings it is difficult to get rid of that way of thinking,” he admitted late in life; “when I was a subaltern the Indian did not seem to me equal to the white man”.

When challenged, during World War II, about his racial views, he said: “Why be apologetic about Anglo-Saxon superiority, that we were superior?”

The British, in his opinion, were also superior to other European peoples, to whom he applied slurs such as “Frogs”, “Huns”, and “Wops”. Still, his world-view was essentially hierarchical. So (despite these distinctions) he still saw Europe as “the home of all the great parent races of the western world”.

Churchill’s callous attitude towards the 1943 Bengal famine is well known – he spoke of “Indians breeding like rabbits” – even if his direct responsibility for the suffering is often exaggerated. At certain times in his career, notably during his twenty-year Liberal phase, he demonstrated more compassion.

In 1906, shortly after he was appointed to his first ministerial job as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, he wrote critically of the “chronic bloodshed” caused by British punitive raids in West Africa. In full sarcastic flow, he observed: “the whole enterprise is liable to be misrepresented by persons unacquainted with Imperial terminology as the murdering of natives and stealing of their lands.”

His denunciation, in 1920, of the “frightfulness” of the Amritsar massacre was rhetorically impressive, though it was actually an exercise in political damage limitation. His decision in 1930 to stake his political chances on opposition to reform in India was a conscious move to the right. His new diehard companions were not greatly pleased to welcome a former turncoat to their ranks, but his remarkable abilities were an indispensable asset to their losing cause.

This statue of Churchill near the Houses of Parliament was sprayed with chalk paint in June 2020, branding him a racist.

© CEphoto, Uwe Aranas. Creative commons licence.

Those who draw attention to these various facts are often accused of ‘denigrating’ Churchill and of ignoring his wartime achievements. The mere mention of Churchill’s racism is seen as an attack upon his entire character. By extension, it is viewed as an attack on Britain and the British people as a whole.

This mentality was captured perfectly in a remark last year by Good Morning Britain presenter Piers Morgan, when a guest criticised Churchill’s legacy: “I’m not going to be told to feel ashamed of my country just because you say we’re a bunch of racists.” Nobody had called Morgan a racist or instructed him to feel personal shame for events that took place long before he was born.

But his reaction illustrated the difficulties involved in trying to engage in meaningful public debate about Churchill, even five and a half decades after his death. Churchill’s statements about race and Empire are worth discussing because they cast light on the world and society in which he lived, and because they cast some light on the origins of our current condition.

This is not a question of remorse, or pride, but of historical understanding. Such understanding cannot be achieved by simply saying: “But Churchill was a man of his time” – and then sweeping the actual meaning of his attitudes under the Downing Street carpet.

This article by Richard Toye was originally published on 24 September 2020 by Tortoise Media. Republished with permission.