The
world is a big place. There is so much we don’t know about it which, in
general, behoves us to hold our tongue.
I am thinking about the furore that has erupted
in the lead-up to this year’s Remembrance Day, a day when the dead of world
wars and other conflicts are remembered and commemorated. This time, the whole
thing has been torpedoed by remarks made by a celebrity commentator, Don Cherry,
whose normal business is to offer commentary on hockey games as they are
played. On this occasion, Mr. Cherry felt impelled to comment on the apparent lack
of a show of gratitude by new immigrants ('These people’, as he called them) to Canada
for the sacrifice made by, presumably exclusively Canada-born veterans, who
had sacrificed much, up to and including, in many cases, paying the ultimate price for the glory and survival of the British Empire, the amenities of which
'these people' dare to enjoy in Canada’s welcoming embrace. Their transgression? ‘These
people’ did not show sufficient appreciation for the afore-mentioned sacrifices by wearing a poppy
emblem on their lapel during the days leading to Remembrance Day.
Whatever the merits or demerits of
wearing or not wearing the emblem on one’s breast, there has to be something eerie
in the vision of the 85-year old Cherry peering into the faces of individuals going
about their normal business in his bid to administer the 'poppy test' as to who is
or is not legit. It is a vision loaded with assumptions and not dissimilar
to the Tebbit
cricket test that, in Britain of the 1990s was supposed to be the measure of an individual’s patriotism, defined by whether they supported
England or another Commonwealth country in a cricket match.
In the case of Mr. Cherry’s, his mistake
was not to have researched the role that immigrants to Canada and their
forebears played in defending the Empire against the opposing forces, starting
even before the two world wars. If Mr. Cherry had done his homework, research would have prevented
him from making a fool of himself. He would have discovered that the defence of
the empire transcended races and regions.
He would have learnt also that the very first shot fired in anger by
British forces in WWI was not by some anonymous person, but by one Alhaji
Grunshi, a Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) Regimental Serjeant Major serving
in Britain’s West African Frontier Force, when he returned fire against German
forces in neighbouring ‘German’ Togoland. Grunshi was, and remains, one of the Forgotten
Soldiers of Empire, whose descendants, more than a century on, are being disrespected by Don Cherry.
But there are multiple other corners of
the world, in the former British Empire, where what these men did, many dying
in the process, is still celebrated and commemorated, including in Sierra Leone,
for example, where Remembrance Day was celebrated this past Sunday and where this writer, in primary school, first
learnt the opening lines of John McCrae’s “In
Flanders Fields, Where Poppies blow…”
Well, by the end of Remembrance Day, the
unapologetic Mr. Cherry has been fired from his position and most people would
say, “Not before time”. Lessons learnt? Maybe.
Tell Fren Tru
