Quotes About Colonization

Brandy is the great cause of destruction for the aborigines of America.

A French writer once observed that, "in the new colonies, the Spanish start by building a church, the English a tavern, and the French a fort.

In Arabic, the name Guadalajara evoked a valley of stones, a valley my ancestors had settled more than eight hundred years earlier. They had carried the disease of empire to Spain, the Spaniards had brought it to the new continent, and someday the people of the new continent would plant it elsewhere. That was the way of the world.

A total of six thousand Cholultecans perished. Cortés ordered the few priests who survived to wash the floors and walls, to rid the temples of idols and in their place to install crosses and images of the Virgin Mary.

Popcorn is American. Nobody but the Indians ever had popcorn, till after the Pilgrim Fathers came to America. On

Of all the weapons the Europeans brought to the Pacific, guns included, none was more powerful and more capable of effecting lasting change than written language.

Years of science fiction have produced a mindset that it is human destiny to expand from Earth, to the Moon, to Mars, to the stars.

During and after the war, though, no one in the Allied countries wanted to be reminded that, only a decade or two earlier, it was the King of the Belgians whose men in Africa had cut off hands. And so the full history of Leopold's rule in the Congo and of the movement that opposed it dropped out of Europe's memory, perhaps even more swiftly and completely than did the other mass killings that took place in the colonization of Africa.

Many of our subjects eagerly lust after Portuguese merchandise that your subjects have brought into our domains. To satisfy this inordinate appetite, they seize many of our black free subjects. . . . They sell them . . . after having taken these prisoners [to the coast] secretly or at night. . . . As soon as the captives are in the hands of white men they are branded with a red-hot iron.

Sorry, but they're burning the State archives." The furnaces burned for eight days, turning most of the Congo state records to ash and smoke in the sky over Brussels. "I will give them my Congo," Leopold told Stinglhamber, "but they have no right to know what I did there.

about 80 percent of the entire land area of Africa was still under indigenous rulers.

those who made the greatest fortunes from the Scramble for Africa, like Leopold, were often men who had fortunes to begin with.

between 1660 and 1807, ships brought well over three times as many Africans across the ocean to British colonies as they did Europeans.

By the end of the 1500s, other European countries had joined in the slave trade: English, French, and Dutch vessels roamed the African coast, looking for human cargo. In 1665, the army of the weakened Kingdom of the Kongo fought a battle with the Portuguese. It was defeated, and the ManiKongo was beheaded. Internal strife further depleted the kingdom, whose territory was all taken over by European colonies by the late 1800s.

Nonetheless, from Edinburgh to Rome, indignant books and speeches and sermons denounced the vicious "Arab" slavers—and with them, by implication, the idea that any part of Africa might be colonized by someone other than Europeans.

We run the risk of someday seeing our native population collapse and disappear," fretfully declared the permanent committee of the National Colonial Congress of Belgium that year. "So that we will find ourselves confronted with a kind of desert.

British territory did cover nearly a quarter of the earth.

When the Atlantic slave trade began decimating the Kongo, that nation was under the reign of a ManiKongo named Nzinga Mbemba Affonso, who had gained the throne in 1506 and ruled as Affonso I for nearly forty years. Affonso's life spanned a crucial period. When he was born, no one in the kingdom knew that Europeans existed.

Thousands of refugees who had fled across the Congo River to escape Leopold's regime eventually fled back to escape the French. The

For him, colonies existed for one purpose: to make him and his country rich. "Belgium doesn't exploit the world," he complained to one of his advisers. "It's a taste we have got to make her learn.

Savages are dangerous neighbours and unprofitable customers, and if they remain as degraded denizens of our colonies, they become a burden upon the State.

do not understand Englishmen at all," Stanley wrote. "Either they suspect me of some self-interest, or they do not believe me. . . . For the relief of Livingstone I was called an impostor; for the crossing of Africa I was called a pirate." Nor was there enthusiasm in the United States for Congo colonization. James Gordon Bennett, Jr., in New York, now wanted to send Stanley off in search of the North Pole.

But those who made the greatest fortunes from the Scramble for Africa, like Leopold, were often men who had fortunes to begin with.

I began to read more. The further I explored, the more it was clear that the Congo of a century ago had indeed seen a death toll of Holocaust dimensions.