Empire Day

For Toussaint and his friends, it was a day of food, games and patriotic songs, just like on Empire Day, the annual holiday created at the turn of the last century to remind children in the United Kingdom’s far-flung outposts that they were British.

My mother, born in pre-independence Nigeria, recalls having to celebrate “Empire Day,” marching in stadiums and singing “God Save the Queen.”

His guardian in England was Stella Monk, who worked for the Empire Day Movement promoting ties between schoolchildren in Britain and its colonies, and she took him to a prep school in Eastbourne.

As schoolchildren, each donned a starched uniform and, on Empire Day, a holiday designed to instill in children a feeling of belonging to a great nation, waved the Union Jack.

They had a holiday, Empire Day, to celebrate it.