Quotes About Colonialism

Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, who issued an extermination order (Vernichtungsbefehl): "Within the German boundaries every Herero, whether found with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, shall be shot. . . . "Signed The Great General of the Mighty Kaiser, von Trotha.

The American poet Vachel Lindsay declaimed:   Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host. Hear how the demons chuckle and yell Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.

As king of a small country with no public interest in colonies, he recognized that a colonial push of his own would require a strong humanitarian veneer. Curbing the slave trade, moral uplift, and the advancement of science were the aims he would talk about, not profits. In 1876, he began planning a step to establish his image as a philanthropist and advance his African ambitions: he would host a conference of explorers and geographers.

Colonialism was also justified by an elaborate ideology, embodied in everything from Kipling's poetry and Stanley's lectures to sermons and books about the shapes of skulls, lazy natives, and the genius of European civilization. And

a 1959 text for young Congolese soldiers studying to become NCOs in the Force Publique explained that history "reveals how the Belgians, by acts of heroism, managed to create this immense territory." Fighting the "Arab" slavers, "in three years of sacrifice, perseverance and steadfast endurance, they brilliantly completed the most humanitarian campaign of the century, liberating

What foreigners saw as insolence, Britons knew as freedom.

Hochschild describes the startling moment when he first learned that forced labor in the Congo had taken eight to ten million lives, making it one of the major killing grounds of modern times.

To those who had lived in Africa for millennia, of course, "there was nothing to discover, we were here all the time," as a future African statesman would put it. But to nineteenth-century Europeans, celebrating an explorer for "discovering" some new corner of Africa was, psychologically, a prelude to feeling that the continent was theirs for the taking.

Britain, of course, had only a dubious right to the high moral view of slavery. British ships had long dominated the slave trade, and only in 1838 had slavery formally been abolished in the British Empire.

he wrote a trenchant warning of the "far-reaching consequences over the wider destiny, not only of South Africa, but of all Negro Africa" that would flow from the fact that Britain had set up the new, independent Union of South Africa with an all-white legislature.

Underlying much of Europe's excitement was the hope that Africa would be a source of raw materials to feed the Industrial Revolution, just as the search for raw materials—slaves—for the colonial plantation economy had driven most of Europe's earlier dealings with Africa. Expectations quickened dramatically after prospectors discovered diamonds in South Africa in 1867 and gold some two decades later.

Prof. Gilley declares that my "central lie," my "first and biggest deceit," is to equate the État independant du Congo, the regime King Leopold II of Belgium controlled for 23 years, with colonialism.

This would mean, according to the estimates, that during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approximately ten million people.

the idea of independence and self-government in Africa was voiced by almost no one, except for a few beleaguered rebels deep in the Congo rain forest. In

Filled with self-pity and calling himself "a man who had given up his life for his country and for Africa," he

The Allied rhetoric about self-determination of peoples did not apply to African or Asian colonies, or to Arab territories known to have oil.

From the colonial era, the major legacy Europe left to Africa was not democracy as it is practiced today in countries like England, France, and Belgium; it was authoritarian rule and plunder.

And finally Money noted that the huge Dutch profits from Java depended on forced labor.

two white men were put on trial for a particularly gruesome set of murders in the French Congo; to celebrate Bastille Day, one had exploded a stick of dynamite in a black prisoner's rectum. Copying

When Leopold turned over his colony to Belgium he burned all the state records, declaring, 'I will give them my Congo, but they have no right to know what I did there.') Truly, this is the aching heart of the story: how a population comprised of millions of souls, spread over nearly a million square miles, rich in language and music and deeply honored traditions, can be muted and erased.

several children had laughed in the presence of a white man, who then ordered that all the servant boys in town be given fifty lashes. The second installment of twenty-five lashes was due at six o'clock the next morning. Lefranc managed to get these stopped, but was told not to make any more protests that interfered with discipline.

Someone once tried to compliment Leopold by saying that he would make "an excellent president of a republic." Scornfully, he turned to his faithful court physician, Jules Thiriar, and asked, "What would you say, Doctor, if someone greeted you as 'a great veterinarian'?" The ruler of a colony would have no parliament to worry about.

We know from a later scrap of oral tradition that Europeans were often believed to have hoofs; not having seen shoes before, some Africans along the river thought them part of white anatomy.

The Irish, he told Lloyd George, were "like nothing so much as a lot of frightened children who dread being thrashed.