In an op-ed on June 4 for Al Jazeera, Kenyan journalist and political cartoonist Patrick Gathara excoriated the Jubilee “celebrations” of the British Empire’s Queen Elizabeth, comparing the Queen and the U.K. to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, respectively, of the famous work by Robert Louis Stevenson. (His comparisons also bring to mind Oscar Wilde’s book, The Picture of Dorian Gray, another tale of an evil personality hiding behind a mask of benevolence.)
Gathara wrote, “The pomp and circumstance surrounding the celebrations, from the marching troops to beacons lit around the world, were undoubtedly reminiscent of the long-faded glories of the empire, which today are personified by the Queen and her family. However, the memory of the horrors that empire visited on millions around the globe—where, to borrow Jekyll’s description of his alter-ego Hyde, ‘evil … had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay’—was almost completely absent from the telling.”
He remarked regarding her visit to Kenya in February 1952, that then Crown Princess Elizabeth and her Consort, Prince Philip, almost skipped going to Kenya during what the world would come to know as the Mau-Mau uprising (which was instigated by British intelligence, as documented later by the EIR). It was during this visit that Elizabeth learned of the death of her father, King George VI (also concurrently the last Emperor of India until August 1947, when India won independence), and so became the next Queen of England. Gathara pointed out that, “The romanticized tale of the girl who went up a tree a princess and descended a queen tends to ignore the circumstances she was thrust into as well as the death, torture, brutalization and dispossession of Kenyans that would mark the first decade of her reign. Needless to say, little of that made it into the Platinum Jubilee brochure.”
