I studied abroad for a year in England during the very early 1980s. One of my flatmates was a Welsh woman. By that, I don’t mean that she came from Wales. I mean that, as she said of her heritage, “My ancestors have been here since Caesar’s time.” 

My friend, a pure Celt, was lily white, which all Welsh people were until recently. As late as 1981, when I traveled with my friend to Cardiff or up north to her family’s ancestral farm, it was 99% white. Nevertheless, the government now insists that the Welsh National Coal Museum must “decolonize” itself by presenting the history of the Welsh coal-mining industry “through the lens of black, Asian and minority ethnic people.”

The story comes from GBN, the conservative alternative to the BBC:

The Welsh Government has told its National Coal Museum to teach “decolonised” history through the lens of ethnic minorities.

Wales, which is 93.8 per cent white, is calling on the former Blaenavon pit to play its part in making the principality “anti-racist”.

[snip]

Under these plans, museums must provide an “authentic and decolonised account of the past, one that recognises both historical injustices and the positive impact of ethnic minority communities”.

What’s important to note is that the reference in that quote to Wales being 93.8 percent white refers to its current population. At the peak of Welsh mining, the miners were white and, like my friend, of Celtic stock:

Image: Striking Welsh coal miners in 1914. Public domain.

However, Wales, like the rest of the United Kingdom, is changing. The First Minister of Wales (that is, the leader of the Welsh government), who is pushing for this initiative is a member of the essentially communist Labour Party. He’s also half-Zambian and was, in fact, born in Zambia to a Welsh father and a Zambian mother:

Image by Senedd Cymru (the Welsh Parliament). CC BY 4.0.  

According to GBN, the way to prove that the Welsh coalminers, as beleaguered a group of entirely white people who ever lived, were in fact colonizers, the Museum will point that the coal they dug out of the mines affected the world economy:

Group for Education in Museums, an advisory body, claimed in its official guidance that while such connections might not be initially “obvious” all Welsh museums “will have some evidence of colonial and imperial trade and wealth”.

I assume that the theory behind this is that the coal provided energy for the British Empire as a whole, and the British Empire was the ultimate, evil “white colonizer.” Everything’s connected, just like “the hip bone connected from the thigh bone.” Funnily enough, this connectivity always stops right at the point that we’re about to learn about African and Muslim complicity in the slave trade, but that’s a story for another post.

However, because it’s going to be a tough road to decolonize the coal mining system, I have a suggested shortcut to focus on the “black” aspect of mining. Enjoy:

Image: Miners digging for coal in South Wales, 1931.

Image: Welsh miners. Unknown provenance.

Image: A minor coal miner in Wales.

Image: Welsh adult and child miners.

The number of black faces in those photographs should go a long way to allaying concerns about black representation in the museum.

Image by Senedd Cymru (the Welsh Parliament). CC BY 4.0.