UK university courses on race and colonialism are facing the axe due to cuts. ‘There’s not very much about race and colonialism on the curriculum to start with,’ fumed Professor Hakim Adi at the report, which revealed that Kent university’s anthropology course and a music programme at Oxford Brookes is under threat. Adi, a former leader of Chichester University’s history of Africa programme, told the Observer. ‘It sends a signal from those in power that these types of subjects are not desired…they just won’t be taught in higher education, if this trend continues’.

This empire obsession is very strange and unfair

To which one is tempted to reply, in the words of Sergeant Major Williams from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, ‘Oh dear, how sad, never mind’. I’m surprised at Professor Adi’s assertion on race and colonialism being sidelined: it often seems as if we talk about little else, particularly in the universities, where ‘decolonisation’ is the starter, main course and pudding of the discourse.

This empire obsession is very strange and unfair; it revives the long-gone imperial and colonial past and views it through only one tiny lens, as if it was in any way directly relevant – indeed central – to modern British society. I’m all for studying history, but this way of studying the past is flawed: it’s as if someone was to dredge up the wars of the Spanish succession every time........

© The Spectator