Thread by @RemainingKind

1)A thread on Ancestral Responsibility in light of the BLM Movement. I would like to say that I believe that the roots of good and evil are the same. We cannot change the past but we can change the future. How? By speaking out and sharing the truth.

2) These are my Great Grandfather’s photos of building a railway in Africa. So what? What’s that to do with me or you? This thread isn’t meant to be a perfectly referenced historical talk, it is simply my emotional response to part of my family history.

3) Ancestral responsibility,What does that mean?. How can we possibly be responsible for what our forefathers did. It was a different time, after all and the morals and norms weren’t that he same as now. We can’t judge our ancestors through the optics of our own society.

4) Let’s just accept it for what it is and move on. Well that is virtually what my father said to me a few weeks ago.

You see I grew up genuinely believing that I had dodged a bullet. Born in the mid 60’s my quasi German name was commented upon.

5) The Germans were still the enemy. Defeated in war (twice) and on the football pitch (just once when it mattered. I was proudly able to tell people that my ancestors weren’t those Germans. They weren’t the Nazi ones.

6) No my Great Grandfather might have been born in Germany but he was a Pioneer and he’d worked for the British. He might have been born Ernst but that additional e, that was slipped onto my Grandfathers birth certificate made all the difference.

7) Our family tree was neatly pruned and reflected the nuclear family of the time. I clearly remember my mother saying ‘You can choose your friends but not your family’.

There was just one aunt and one cousin on my mother’s side but my dad’s family was immense.

8) He only had two brothers but there were cousins and second cousins and a whole diaspora of Ernests in Canada. (even though they were now Hortons).

And we were linked by our connection to Waldemar Fredrich Carl Ernst (or Walter Charles Ernest as his death certificate records).

9) We were the grandchildren and great grandchildren of this enigmatic man.

There were so many stories about him.

He imported animals for London Zoo from Africa
He was a tyrant
He was born in Hamburg but his death certificate says he was born in Surrey.

10) He spoke multiple languages
He was an agent.
He was a German national
He wasn’t a German national
He had worked on The Ugandan Railway
That railway was known as the lunatic express.
My Grandfather was too scared to die in case he met him again.

11) He’d twice been a millionaire and twice lost his fortunes.
He was descended from German Chapel ceiling painters.

Romantic and terrifying stories that were interwoven. Chunks missing. Bits added by cousins and great aunts.

12) But I don’t remember my Grandfather ever speaking about him. Other than knowing that he was still terrified of him.

So there he was. An enigma. A mystery.

13) I always knew there were some photograph albums of his time in Africa. They were so precious that as children we weren’t allowed to look at them. My dad inherited them from my Grandfather; or maybe they came to him before my Grandfather died.

14)I remember that they were in our house but never really paid much interest. Dusty black and white photos of a time gone by that were so alien and anyway, they were just of the railways. After my mum died my dad went to live with my sister; the photos finished up in our house.

15) I went to look through the photos. My father had annotated some. A few years back, he gave a talk to the U3A recalling how his Grandfather had been one of the first White Men in Nairobi,responsible for building the Ugandan Railway, just an objective view of the facts.

16) When I went to open up the albums I expected to see dusty shots of dreary Edwardian railway men. The first time I looked I was appalled at the photos of all the Trophy hunting that had been done. Pages and pages of photos dead animals posing for real.

17) There’s something, in the back of my mind, I hadn’t processed. A letter from my Great Aunt from the 80’s entitled Memories of a childhood in Africa.

18) Tales of Black Mambas and a baby sister dying in childhood, of my Great Grandmother singing at the piano and of my Great Grandfather’s friendship with Cecil Rhodes. Water off a duck’s back. Didn’t think about it. At least he wasn’t a Nazi remember?

19) I sort of knew about the Rhodes statue at Oriel but I didn’t know much about him. When the Colston Statue fell his in 2020 the name Rhodes was mentioned again and people started calling for his statue in Oxford to be taken down.

20) It prompted me to go and look at the photos again. The first thing I saw, after the photo of my Great Grandparents, my Grandfather and Great Aunt, was a photo of Rhodes. Yes look there he is, in amongst the photos. I was a bit taken aback.

21) Reading back through my Great Aunt’s letter I’ve just seen that one of her middle names Cecelia was “after Cecil Rhodes, the founder of Southern Rhodesia and a friend of my father’s”

22) Suddenly I was looking with different eyes. These weren’t dusty Victorian Gentlemen working in Africa, the Pioneers my father spoke about. Suddenly I saw privilege and brutality

24) Pictures of buildings and views that had just been boring pictures of buildings and views were suddenly placed in context

(The Recruiting Office in Karachi
(A Government Building in Bombay)
(The Harbour at Colombo)

24) My Great Grandfather had been in part responsible for bringing labourers from India in 1895 to build the Mombassa to Uganda Railway. Over 32,000 ‘coolies' came. 2,500 ‘coolies’ died. They were imported due to lack of suitable or ‘willing’ indigenous labourers.

The more I look the more disturbed and fascinated I am.

So where does my Ancestral Responsibility lie?

Is it to carry on the objective truth that my father tells, lions?

Or is it to expose the emotional truth?

We did not belong and we did great harm?

Not sure where the lions in that tweet came from !