Looking back as a white man I notice the absences.The absences of Black people in the stories I grew up with, of the Romans in Britain, of Tudor England, of the Second World War...there was a regiment of Black US soldiers preparing for D-Day in the village I grew up in, and not a word was told of it. Coming to Bath I had to dig to find the stories of Black Romans and Black Georgians, I stumbled on the stories of Haile Selassie and Sancho and Bridgetower and of course the vast wealth that flowed into the city generated by theft, mass murder and the cruel exploitation of colonised people. There is a shameful silence and absence in the story of Bath part of an officially induced amnesia around whole chunks of the history of this country and this nation of England. It denies people racialised as Black far, far, more than me, but  the consequence is that I too am incomplete and disconnected from my becoming.

The more I notice the absences and silences in the stories and ways I have come to know the world, the more I reflect on what an anglocentric white supremacist education has deprived me of... and what through the atrocities of colonialism people like me have deprived other peoples of. It is not simply the looting of stuff from colonised nations it is the deliberate destruction and denigration of nonmodern, non European knowledges, the epistemic violence. People and their ways of being were stolen or trashed by colonisers, languages silenced, cultures suppressed in favour of a white elite European tradition. This silencing, these absences, the denial of theft and the refusal of responsibility embodied in the Master House all diminish my sense of who I can be and how we will be.

Decolonisation is a beginning of an essential unpacking and repair, opening up the possibility of healing the epistemic wounds of colonisation, discovering and perhaps making the tools to dismantle the Masters House.