logo

Quotes About Colonialism

The ongoing falsification of history has greater objectives than erasing the Palestinian people and their collective claim to human rights and dignity. It also aims at normalizing Israeli military occupation, apartheid, and colonialism. It provides a historical amnesty for all the crimes that Israel has committed and will continue to commit.
~ Sheldon Richman
They are the same tribal laborers that the British brought in from central India. They use them because they are considered hardworking and obedient.
~ Mary Roach
They hanged my mother. I watched her body swing from the lower branches of a silk cotton tree. She had committed a crime for which there is no pardon. She had struck a white man. She had not killed him, however. In her clumsy rage she had only managed to gash his shoulder
~ Maryse Condé
We were in Africa. I know, I know. What were we doing there? We must have lived, somehow. Eaten, slept, raised children? Was it so savage and horrible that it is netter forgotten? Who can tell me? No one. Because nobody knows and everyone takes for granted what they've been told.
~ Maryse Condé
No one is morally justified in removing a man from his own soil, taking him to a faraway country and keeping him there by force. And no man is morally entitled to own another.
~ Barbara Erskine
But a Congolese life is like the useless Congolese bill, which you can pile by the fistful or the bucketful into a merchant's hand, and still not purchase a single banana. It's dawning on me that I live among men and women who've simply always understood their whole existence is worth less than a banana to most white people. I see it in their eyes when they glance up at me.
~ Barbara Kingsolver
I read in a book that they cut off the workers' hands if they hadn't collected enough rubber by the end of the day. The Belgian foremen would bring baskets full of brown hands back to the boss, piled up like a mess of fish. Could this be true of civilized white Christians?
~ Barbara Kingsolver
colonial American and Australian schoolchildren once memorized poems about British skylarks while the blue jays or cockatoos (according to continent) squawked outside, utterly ignored. The dominant culture has a way of becoming more real than the stuff at hand.
~ Barbara Kingsolver
Léopoldville is a nice little town of dandy houses with porches and flowery yards on nice paved streets for the whites, and surrounding it, for miles and miles, nothing but dusty run-down shacks for the Congolese. They make their homes out of sticks or tin or anything in the world they can find. Father said that is the Belgians' doing and Americans would never stand for this kind of unequal treatment.
~ Barbara Kingsolver
He is the one wife belonging to many white men. Anatole explained it this way: Like a princess in a story, Congo was born too rich for her own good, and attracted attention far and wide from men who desire to rob her blind. The United States has now become the husband of Zaire's economy, and not a very nice one. Exploitive and condescending, in the name of steering her clear of the moral decline inevitable to her nature.
~ Barbara Kingsolver
We Belgians made slaves of them and cut off their hands in the rubber plantations. Now you Americans have them for a slave wage in the mines and let them cut off their own hands. And you, my friend, are stuck with the job of trying to make amens.
~ Barbara Kingsolver
Why, Dr. Livingstone, I presume, wasn't he the rascal! He and all the profiteers who've since walked out on Africa as a husband quits a wife, leaving her with her naked body curled around the emptied-out mine of her womb. I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience. I
~ Barbara Kingsolver
She knew from other places she'd worked that rich people liked owning things made by different kinds of people--Africans, Eskimos, Native Americans. It didn't seem to matter what the object looked like, or to what gory purpose it might have been put, as long as it had belonged to some other people first, and as long ago as possible.
~ Barbara Neely
you know how our high street banks got started? From the fortunes Mr Lloyd and Mr Barclay made from making Jamaica into a concentration camp for slaves to grow sugar. Then the world sugar price collapsed and we gave them independence and pissed off. Like walking out on this totally traumatised family you've been bashing up for several hundred years.
~ Barry Maitland
the former colony itself becoming colonialist.
~ Stephen Kinzer
McKinley could not believe that Aguinaldo's insurgents would be so stupid as to resist the power and benevolence of the United States.
~ Stephen Kinzer
Imbued as he was with the idea that only whites could rule the islands efficiently, he was able to consider this a form of patriotism.
~ Stephen Kinzer
Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.
~ Steve Berry
Charles Napier, the British army's commander in chief in India, faced with local complaints about the abolition of suttee, replied, "You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."14
~ Steven Pinker
Well before Africans were enslaved by Europeans, they were enslaved by other Africans, as well as by Islamic states in North Africa and the Middle East. Some of those states did not abolish legal slavery until recently: Qatar in 1952; Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962; Mauritania in 1980.
~ Steven Pinker
One of the tragic ironies of the second half of the 20th century is that when colonies in the developing world freed themselves from European rule, they often slid back into warfare, this time intensified by modern weaponry, organized militias, and the freedom of young men to defy tribal elders.77 As we shall see in the next chapter, this development is a countercurrent to the historical decline of violence, but it is also a demonstration of the role of Leviathans in propelling the decline.
~ Steven Pinker
Maria Clara did not faint, simply because the Filipinos do not know how to faint.
~ Jose Rizal
In the Philippines, however, well removed from Spain, the friars continued their domination of both secular and religious life. This long-term influence was more political than cultural or linguistic, but in the strictest sense secular power in the colony was subordinate, and the effect of such control was that civil government was subordinated to a "friarocracy.
~ Jose Rizal
Malungkot at naninimdim ang dukhà. Sa gabing iyon, kung bahagya mang nagdasal ay nanalangin namang labis, nagdurusa ang mga mata't lumuluha ang puso. Wala siyang mga nobena, hindi alam ang mga jaculatoria, ni ang mga berso, ni ang mga oremus na kinatha ng mga fraile upang gamitin ng mga walang sariling isip ni sariling damdamin.
~ Jose Rizal