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Paper short abstract:

The paper analyzes how a public apology to British child migrants sent to settler colonies attempts to reconcile with and re-voice a previously silenced history. Concurrently, the apology’s limited and individualized focus reflects broader patterns of colonial forgetfulness and selective silencing.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is concerned with how postcolonial societies imagine, address and attempt to reconcile with their precarious pasts – histories “constitutive and foundational in their making, but (…) problematic by today’s moral standards” (Gapud 2020, 332) – through public apology. The case I examine is a postwar migration project, which selected and permanently re-located white British children to colonial Southern Rhodesia as a policy of child welfare and imperial migration. The scheme proclaimed to offer the children “better lives” – ones with opportunities for social advancement –, while it simultaneously pursued to secure and strengthen the colony’s racially segregated social order. Whereas episodes perceived national shame might have conventionally been silenced and un-commemorated, the “age of apology” has brought forth the atoning for past wrongs as a major political phenomenon. Consequently, in 2010 the UK government gave an apology to former child migrants sent to its colonies and dominions. The paper focuses on the narrative means by which the child migrant apology proposes to re-voice a previously silenced history. It argues that by emphasizing individual suffering and the singularity of wrongdoing and neglect – rather than addressing wider political and racialized power structures – the apology reflects and reproduces broader patterns of settler colonial forgetfulness and selective silences. It further suggests that while the apology aims to recognize and reconcile with the victims of state policies, it partially ends up de-contextualizing and a-historicizing their experience, thus re-silencing as it re-voices.