The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

For instance, the Nigerian novelist and hero of anticolonialism Chinua Achebe said in 2012, “The legacy of colonialism is not a simple one but one of great complexity, with contradictions—good things as well as bad.” And in his final book, There Was a Country (2012), Achebe wrote, “Here is a piece of heresy. The British governed their colony of Nigeria with considerable care. There was a very highly competent cadre of government officials imbued with a high level of knowledge of how to run a country . . . British colonies were, more or less, expertly run. . . . One was not consumed by fear of abduction or armed robbery. One had a great deal of confidence and faith in British institutions. Now all that is changed.”45 Achebe is not alone in his assessment. Scholars and writers such as Nirad C. Chaudhuri and Dr. Zareer Masani have argued eloquently in the case of India that what the empire left behind was not just the railroads and the Indian civil service but the scholarship of men such as Sir William Jones and James Prinsep, who unlocked the classical language of India and handed that civilization back to itself.