There is No Need for the Lord Macaulay Hoax

We received a forward via social media this week claiming to be a note from someone called Lord Macaulay. Now while someone by that name did exist, nothing else about the note was true. The man in question’s full name was Thomas Babington Macaulay and he was indeed a British politician but that is where the accuracy of the forwarded note ends. Below is the forwarded post.

The first thing that you may notice is an attempt to make this look like an extract from a paper or journal from the actual period of time that this was supposed. You will notice that the date is handwritten as 2-2-1835. It is not possible for this to be the case based on the typeface and font. For one, there were definitely not computers available and the typewriter wasn’t invented until 1868.

Now, let’s say this was not the original note, but a recreation as the original may not have been legible. The year was 1835. Slavery was abolished in 1833. This means that by the time of Lord Macaulay’s travel across the continent, it would have already been ravaged by Europeans and other slave traders, so the description of Africa presented is highly unlikely to be accurate.

If all this wasn’t enough to highlight the inaccuracy of this post, we then stumble upon the following forwarded post.

In this one, they simply swap the name Africa for India. Which for similar reasons as before, is clearly inaccurate as well. It is not clear what the purpose of these notes are, but I would urge people to just rely on the truth about European colonisation. There is no need for the Lord Macaulay hoax or any other hoax for that matter, as the truth would be far more effective.