Post-imperial apologies: who should offer them, who should demand them?

I’m not entirely sure about the demands of former colonies for apologies from their original colonial masters. I’m not denying that the colonial powers did plenty to apologise for. It’s just now always clear who should be apologising, or who should be receiving the apology.

I mean, in some cases it’s obvious. Europeans burned African slaves to death, often in the slowest possible way, in the West Indies. I can see that the descendants of the Europeans could well apologise to the descendants of those slaves. Or the French could apologise for torturing Algerians, as the Brits could apologise for torturing Kenyans. But what happens in, say, the States? Should the Americans have an apology from the Brits for their behaviour there? The behaviour was certainly lousy, towards slaves and indigenous people, but aren’t today’s US citizens the heirs of the benefits extracted by those shameful means?

You may have noticed that last Friday, 13 August – Friday the 13th but, hey, who’s superstitious? – the Mexicans celebrated, or perhaps the better word would be ‘marked’, the 500th anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan. That was the old Aztec capital city, and its final capture by the conquistador Hernán Cortés, marked the definitive establishment of Spanish rule over what is today called Mexico.

This year also include the 200th anniversary of Mexico’s independence from Spain, to be celebrated – no ambiguity about the term in this case, this is certainly a celebration – on 21 September. 

As part of the preparations for these momentous anniversaries, the Mexican president wrote in March to the Spanish king, calling for an official apology to Mexico for the horrors that followed the Spanish conquest of his country. Horrors there certainly were. There was murder and torture and, of course, widespread rape. 

Why, even the woman towards whom Mexicans maintain a deeply ambivalent attitude, ‘La Malinche’, Cortés’s interpreter and mistress, was the mother of his son, quite possibly the first ‘mestizo’, mixed race child, of the country. Since the mixing of the races is what made Mexico, and indeed Latin America generally, she’s the mother of the nation. But, as the mistress of the conqueror, she’s also its primordial traitor. A very complex mix of emotions…

And yet she was no mistress. Rather, he was her master. She had been given to him by an allied indigenous tribe, as a slave. Cortés had done what so many white slave owners would do down the ages, perhaps most famously the third President of the United States Thomas Jefferson with his slave Sally Hemings, and fathered a child on a slave woman who had no power to stop him, no authority to deny consent. That surely constitutes the textbook definition of rape.

The mother of the nation a rape victim? Yes, as you dig down through the complexities of this story, you find only deeper complexities.

So there’s certainly plenty for Spanish people to apologise for, I suppose. But who should be doing the apologising?

Clearly it would have to be a white European. That you could probably tell from the appearance of the person. It would be a native speaker of Spanish. And it would be somebody who had a Spanish surname, or even a pair of surnames, as is the Spanish custom. Surnames such as, for instance, López Obrador.

Those happen to be the surnames of the President of Mexico. The man who wrote the letter demanding the apology. He’s a Spanish speaker. His maternal grandfather was from Northern Spain, as were the parents of his paternal grandmother.

Just so you can check on his white European roots, I’ve included a photo of him.

AMLO, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, President of Mexico

Funnily enough, he does also have some indigenous and even African blood. Pretty remote but nonetheless there.

So perhaps, on behalf of his whole nation, and the nation of his ancestors, he could apologise to himself?