In international politics, too, memories roam and fuel conduct. Take the very moving film about a white farming family in Zimbabwe this week. What was the back-story, the historical decisions and power grabs that created the civil enmities? We Ugandan Asians were cruelly dispossessed by Idi Amin in Uganda, but we too must ask why so many Africans ended up hating us – our racism and economic greed consumed them and they then behaved abominably. And the British need to acknowledge their role in the making of leviathans like Mugabe and Amin.
According to Alibhai-Brown's logic, the original sin is always more important than anything else that follows and the real culprits are never doers who fit a particular profile or share a certain history but rather those who should have stopped them or who enabled them or had the power over them once upon a time. In short, Mugabe and Amin were creatures of the Brits who don't have the right to judge them because they are the original sinners.
Scary and distressing logic, which divides the world between the powerful who are always guilty of something because the sinful past and the weak who always have an excuse for doing the unconscionable. In short, the notion of sin in politics is a limited, destructive and misguided one which just facilitates intellectual masturbation and other self-indulgences.
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