It is raining this evening, dusk subsumed by dark clouds that shelter me from the sun. I have left the conference hall at the hotel in Hikkeduwa on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, promising to be back in time for the last session of the first day of the Commonwealth People’s Forum. The day did not bring with it what I had imagined: fiery, passionate appeals by civil society organisations and representatives from across 15 countries of the Commonwealth, voices raised in anticipation of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting later in the week. For some reason I am bewildered at the notion of the Commonwealth in the post-colonial world where countries such as ours are keeling over from the ties that bind us to former and recently crowned colonial powers.

Last night, at the opening ceremony where the President of Sri Lanka, Shri Mahinda Rajapakse, spoke, the ghost of colonial conquest loomed large, right before our eyes. The ceremony was held in the old Dutch fort built in Galle, first by the Portuguese and then by the Dutch who conquered Galle in 1640, rebuilding the fort in 1663, enabling them to control the bay of this resource rich island-state. The Dutch East India Company, precursor of the “Company” which came to trade in the Bay of Cambay in 1608, opened up the subcontinent of India, then the wealthiest state on earth, to pillage and plunder exercised by the imperial power of Great Britain, made greater still by the acquisition of the coveted Jewel in the Crown.

Transforming itself from a trading company to a ruling enterprise, the Company went on to siphon off resources from one of the richest provinces, Bengal, after Nawab Sirajudaullah’s defeat by Robert Clive at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. The loot of Bengal, coupled with the famine of 1769-70, which the British did nothing to alleviate, wiped out a third of the entire population of Bengal. After 1784, Warren Hastings, then Governor General of India, was succeeded by Cornwallis who initiated the Permanent Settlement whereby an agreement was reached with zamindars or landlords for the collection of revenue. Less than a hundred years later, following the Rebellion in 1857, the East India Company was dissolved, leaving a legacy of exploitation and extraction to be dealt with by generations of the once-colonised.

But I digress. I am still at the Galle Fort which encloses the entire peninsula, an area of 52 hectares, an important strategic stronghold for the emerging colonial power which went on to conquer many other lands as far apart as Surinam in South America and the island of Aruba in the West Indies. The fort encloses within it the Dutch Evangelical Church built in Baroque style in 1775, paved with gravestones from the old Dutch cemetery. There is a hospital and quaint houses in the Dutch style, providing a glimpse of home to the colonialist, reminiscent of another Dutch colony, the Cape of Good Hope, now simply known as Cape Town, South Africa’s southern most city and probably the most beautiful patch of earth.

I have a very special connection with that city, despite its violent past where people of one colour gave themselves the right to conquer, enslave, marginalise, and dehumanise people of other colours. It is the city where my mother was born, where she grew up and became politicised at the tender age of 12, joining the Youth League of the African National Congress. I have visited in recent times, but never had the urge to enter the precincts of the Castle of Good Hope, built between 1666 and 1679, just a few years after the Galle Fort across the ocean, far away and yet closely linked by mercantile and imperial interests. I never wanted to visit the church, the bakery, the quarters of the soldiers of the garrison, the prisons and the residence of the governor with its podium balcony from where the governor would make pronouncements to soldiers or the newly colonised subjects of this peninsula overlooking the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. I never wanted to see for myself the place where slaves were sold like animals, herded and prodded into cattle carts to farm the vast hinterland of that beautiful country. I did not want to hear the whispers of ghosts lurking in the dark corners of that massive stone structure, standing testimony to human greed and inhumanity.

And yet, tonight, I look out at the sea, listening to a live performance of the Royal Overseas League playing chamber music on viola and clarinet. I know in my heart that the Commonwealth People’s Forum shall probably not address issues of systemic injustice and structural inequality, as much as I know that the whisper of surging water is just the sea, not the ocean.