I write regarding your lead letter of May 8, with the headline, “We should be proud that Britain brought democracy to the world”.

Stuart Bower takes WJ McIlroy to task for not getting his facts right – and then proceeds to do exactly that by getting his facts wrong.

It is incumbent on all right-thinking people that we separate illusions and conjectures from historical facts.

What the US would have turned out to be without the British Empire is pure speculation. The women of a now divided Indian sub-continent, still slaving (and dying) in the service of free trade and free mobility of capital confused with democracy, are unlikely to thank British colonialism for their “freedoms”.

One can assume that the history of Southern Africa would have been different without Shaka-Zulu, in the same way we can assume a different trajectory of history in Europe had Napoleon not existed.

In any case, by the time Britain had annexed Zululand, Shaka was long since dead.

The British administration confined the indigenous people to an area north of the Tugela River on pain of imprisonment, torture and death of those foolish enough to move around freely in their own country. It was Sir Theophilus Shepstone, the British administrator of Natal, who first introduced a policy of segregation.

As for the slave trade: Manumission was declared in 1834.

The slave ships were intercepted not in the interest of a nascent democracy but to purloin its human cargo for a lucrative profit at the Cape.

I am a direct descendant of slaves transported from the state of Malabar in India and sold to work in the vineyards long after 1834.

This was a practise encouraged and endorsed by Lord Charles Somerset, the governor-general at the Cape. Just for the record; democracy only arrived in South Africa in 1994.

I have no attachment to the English patron saint St George, but if his trusty sword was aimed at misplaced patriotism, spurious deceit and mendacity, I would be happy to salute him.

Lorna de Smidt, Lincoln Road, Portslade