Hurt People, Hurt People — And The World Keeps Bleeding

“When we repeat the same patterns of harm, we chip away at our world until there’s nothing left to hold it together.”

I’ve been in rooms where my British accent hit harder than my Blackness.
You can see it in a person’s face — that flicker of something sharp, a tension that wasn’t there a second ago. With some Black South Africans I’ve worked with, it’s been almost tangible: the shift in tone, the extra effort to make me feel unwelcome, as if my voice alone carried the weight of every humiliation, injustice, and theft their families endured under British rule.

It didn’t matter that I was Ghanaian.
It didn’t matter that my family fled Britain’s meddling in Ghana in the 1980s.
It didn’t matter that my ancestors were colonised too.
It didn’t matter that my family never profited from empire.

In that moment, I wasn’t Shirley — I was Britain.

And it’s not just at work.
For four years in Sydney, I lived in a predominantly Jewish South African community in the Eastern Suburbs. Nearly all my neighbours — except two or three — were South African Jews. They were friendly, polite, and neighbourly, but there was always an invisible line. If you weren’t Jewish, you were never fully “in.” The welcome was warm, but the door to belonging stayed half-closed.

Britain the Villain… and the Forgotten Others

When we talk about colonisation, Britain takes most of the heat. And to be clear — it earned much of that heat. But here’s the thing: Britain didn’t invent the transatlantic slave trade.

Portugal started it.
Spain expanded it.
The Dutch industrialised it.
France ran some of the deadliest plantations in human history.
Belgium’s King Leopold II turned the Congo into his personal torture chamber.

Brazil became the largest slave-based society in the world, and to this day, racism and colourism are woven into its social fabric. Yet modern Portugal is somehow seen as an expat dream destination — even for African Americans — without most people confronting its direct role in the suffering of millions.

Selective Memory

The West obsesses over Britain’s colonial sins but largely glosses over the Iberian, Dutch, and French legacies that still shape the Americas, Africa, and Asia.
And don’t even get me started on Rome.

Rome was the blueprint for European colonialism — conquest, slavery, cultural erasure, economic extraction — yet it’s romanticised, its ruins a backdrop for wedding photos and holiday selfies.

And here’s my truth: Rome is one of my favourite cities in Europe.
I had my first solo holiday there in my early 30s, and it gave me a new confidence in travelling alone. The people were warm, the food was incredible, and the city’s beauty was overwhelming. My favourite part was the old city — the ruins, the Forum, the Trevi Fountain, and especially the Colosseum, which moved me in a way I didn’t expect. Standing there felt almost spiritual.

So yes — I too have fallen for the romanticised version of Rome. I’ve felt its magic. And yet… it’s complicated. Because those same stones I admired were built on systems of exploitation and domination that set the stage for centuries of empire.

Watching We Are the Lucky Ones

When I watched We Are the Lucky Ones, I couldn’t stop thinking about Brazil.
In the story, many of the family eventually settle there. And yet Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery — in 1888 — less than 60 years before the events of World War II. The backdrop to this Jewish survival story is a country where Afro-Brazilians were still living with the direct consequences of enslavement, entrenched racism, and exclusion from power.

The show tells the story of a Jewish family’s survival during the Holocaust — a powerful, necessary story. But as I watched, I couldn’t shake the thought: many of those same global powers who stood up to save the Jews also built and profited from systems of slavery, racism, and colonial violence that still scar the world today.

How do we reconcile that?
How do we celebrate moral courage in one context while ignoring moral failure in another?

It made me think about the complexity of history — how the same Jewish people who faced unimaginable persecution in Europe could also build new lives in countries like Brazil, South Africa, America, the Caribbean, and Australia where they benefitted from — and in some cases participated in — systems that oppressed others.

It’s complicated. It’s not about denying their suffering in Europe — that was real and horrific. But watching the show made me think about how often people who’ve been hurt turn around and participate in systems that hurt others. The Irish, Scots are also guilty of this — and even African nations have done the same. How suffering in one context doesn’t automatically make you just in another.

The World Right Now

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
America’s endless interventions abroad while struggling with its own racial wounds.
Australia, Canada, and New Zealand — all still operating on land taken from Indigenous peoples, still carrying the same power structures they inherited from empire.

Even Africa and Asia are not immune — post-independence wars, corruption, and oppression carried out by leaders whose people once fought for freedom, only to turn the tools of control inward.

Acknowledging Myself

I am Ghanaian — African through and through — born in Kumasi, raised in England from the age of two and a half.
My family left because of Britain’s meddling in Ghana during the 1980s, still trying to pull the strings decades after independence. The irony is sharp: we ran to the very hands that had hurt us, and in doing so, became British.

It’s a love–hate relationship.
I love England for the life it gave me, the education, the communities, the culture I grew up in.
But I hate its crimes — against my homeland, against so many others.

When the Queen died, my mother cried.
And I understood why — because our connection to Britain is complicated, emotional, and impossible to untangle from the harm it’s done.

I live with that contradiction every day.

The British Bubble

One of Britain’s greatest blind spots is how it sees itself versus how much of the world sees it.
Inside the UK, there’s often a quiet pride — a belief in fair play, in being “the good guys” of history. Abroad, especially in former colonies, that’s not how the story goes. There’s resentment, pain, and in some cases outright hostility toward anything British.

Brexit, to me, was the perfect symbol of that bubble — a nostalgic, rose-tinted vision of Britain’s past greatness, completely detached from how the rest of the world actually experiences British power. It was a decision made as if history’s wounds don’t exist, as if relationships with other nations are shaped purely by trade and not by centuries of domination.

This disconnect — between the British self-image and global memory — is part of why being British abroad can be so loaded. It’s not always what you’ve done, but what your country represents in someone else’s history.

Hurt People Hurting People

Being hurt does not give you a licence to hurt someone else.
South Africans who use British accents as a target for revenge.
Israelis who justify Palestinian suffering in the name of Jewish safety.
Former colonies that adopt the exact same extractive systems as their colonisers.
It’s all the same pattern: hurt people hurting people.

I’ve been listening to Israel justify its treatment of the Palestinian people — saying it is not the same as what the Nazis did to them.
I’ve read threads on Reddit and Quora where Jews go out of their way to insist that what they experienced was the worst humanity has ever inflicted, that no other group in history has been treated the same way, and that no one can claim Israel’s actions are comparable to what they endured.

It fascinates me.
With all the pain that various peoples have endured — including Indigenous groups who have been reduced to almost nothing, or erased entirely — there is still this belief among some Jews that they are the most wronged people on the planet.

Either way — whether they are or not — it’s neither here nor there.
The question is not “is this worse or better than what was done to us?”
It’s “is this right?”

The Only Way Out

History doesn’t absolve us — it warns us.
If you’ve been hurt, I believe you.
If you’ve survived, I respect you.
But if you hurt someone else in the name of your own suffering, I’m asking you to stop.

We do not heal by passing our wounds on.
We heal by being the end of them.

We heal by being the end of the wounds.