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‘My great fear is that we are suffering from amnesia I wrote to recover the memory of the human rainbow, which is in danger of being mutilated… We are much more than we are told We are much more beautiful’   Eduardo Galeano, 2013     February 2023: ‘A magisterial survey’ of the British Empire by Oxford ethics professor Nigel Biggar is lauded in the right-wing press In Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, Biggar seeks to defend the Empire from its most egregious accusations – greed, racism, land theft, genocide and economic exploitation Cover blurbs from supporters hail the study as: ‘A timely riposte to the ethically flawed and unhistorical campaign by Black Lives Matter [which] conflate[s] benevolent empire with slavery and, worse still, Nazism’ and ‘Any objective reader not blinded by woke prejudice will recognise that this [is] one of the great debates of our times: whether we should be ashamed by our forefathers’    The study has riven academia and ignited the ever-glowing embers of the so-called culture wars Our history has become ever more politicised, with the biggest casualty of such debates the public’s understanding of it    The 2015 campaign Rhodes Must Fall, to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oxford High Street, which gained impetus again in 2020 following George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter protests, receives special attention from Biggar Rhodes was a ‘moral mixture’, Biggar states, and not a racist, decrying the ‘shouty zealotry of small group of students’ and their academic supporters, and using selective facts to prop up his argument The case of Rhodes Must Fall – that his policies of racial segregation led in later years to apartheid; that he promoted slavery in his diamond mines; that he stole African lands in nefarious ways – can all be explained within the context of time and place, explains Biggar The anti-colonialists have distorted history for their own ends, he argues: their retrospective morality is essentially as flawed as a rough diamond’s surface, applying today’s ethics and morals to our ancestors’ deeds will of course cast them in a fractured light    The truth