Quotes About Colonialism

We must always remember that the fossil fuel era began in violent kleptocracy, with those two foundational thefts of stolen people and stolen land that kick-started a new age of seemingly endless expansion. The route to renewal runs through reckoning and repair: reckoning with our past and repairing relationships with the people who paid the steepest price of the first industrial revolution.

Next you will cry about taxation without representation, and throw a basket of tea into the harbor. You are indeed a very Jacobin at heart, and I think I must give up trying to cure you of it; I can but wash my hands and deny responsibility

Des « bâtards du Rhin », environ la moitié (soit trois cent quatre-vingt-cinq) fut stérilisée23.

While strategies of colonialism were about removing and seperating people from that which is most important to them, healing and recovery must be about restoring what has been taken, reconnecting people to the stories and context of one's life and family. (p. 19)

For no matter what the factual data were, all the books written about Blacks by their conquerors reflected the conquerors viewpoints.

My mother was a member of the Cape Coloured community. 'Coloured' is the South African word for the half-caste community that was a by-product of the early contact between black and white.

The ending of the slave trade was one of many European policies imposed upon Africa by the conquerors.

Even when the British took part in these wars, they fought on other people's territory or at sea.

Contrary to various economic theories of imperialism, Africa was not a major outlet for European investment or exports.

Forced labor was one of the most widespread and most deeply resented of the chronic abuses to which conquered Africans were subjected.

The Islamic jihads of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created new Moslem states in West Africa, which in turn promoted enslavement on a larger scale.7'Altogether, between 1650 and 1850, at least 5 million slaves were shipped from West Africa alone.74

The need for Nigerian clerks and other subordinates to help man the colonial administration required creating a new class of African people with education in the English language, with Westernized concepts, and with experience in Westernized ways of doing things.

As world prices fell during the Great Depression, the poll tax imposed on Africans remained the same in money terms, which is to say, it increased in real terms. To ensure the payment of this tax, the colonial official pressured African farmers into growing larger export crops, even at the expense of food. Thus Africans had to depend on government famine relief when local food crops were disappointing.

The most spectacular-and embittering-of the British suppressions of the Irish was Oliver Cromwell's punitive expedition of 1649

Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp Murry (1888–1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. When she was 19, Mansfield left New Zealand and settled in the United Kingdom, where she became a friend of modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. During the First World War, she contracted extrapulmonary tuberculosis, which led to her death at the age of 34.

When the French were here, they began cutting down the trees. Haiti's dictators finished the job, leaving the topsoil to run into the ocean. All that splendid mahogany furniture in Paris salons and this is the result: a bald brown island with a muddy coast.

walk out to the middle of the road and look both ways, trying to determine in which direction town might be. To the left, nothing but dry fields. To the right, the same. No shade, no life. Just the blazing Kenyan sun in front, and behind me, at the hotel, a cruel pantomime of Africa played out in blackface, replete with rich, tanned Euro-travelers demanding afternoon cocktails from illiterate Kenyan waiters in bow ties and white jackets.

The white man who is our agent is so stingy that he carries a linen rag in his pocket into which to blow his nose, for fear he might blow away something of value. — Piapot

See," Ochwiay Biano said, "how cruel the whites look. Their lips are thin, their noses sharp, their faces furrowed and distorted by folds. Their eyes have a staring expression; they are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something; they are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want. We do not understand them. We think that they are mad." I

England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales might have been partners in an imperial project that required the projection of 'English Literature' as one of the defining elements of cultural superiority that justified the continuous extension of Empire throughout the nineteenth century, but they were also engaged in an internal struggle over the origins and the dynamics of that literature, and about the role of their national literatures within the consolidating discipline of English.

Ethiopia doesn't matter to the West," I say, stating the obvious. "We offer them nothing they can exploit.

It felt like betrayal, but in truth it was simply Muhammed Bruce's lament for the passing of an era. A time when Europeans had roamed the earth in pursuit of adventure, largely oblivious to the lives and laws of the people in the countries they picked through like cherries. Spitting out the pits. Just like my parents. They had stomped on the world like the Burtons of their era, only worse somehow because they did not think that their shoes left marks.

General Robert Baden-Powell, later founder of the Boy Scouts, drastically cut African rations in an attempt to spare not just his own men but any white civilians trapped in the town with them. His plan was to starve the native population until they were forced to break out of the besieged city in search of food, thus reducing the number of mouths to feed.

Like others at the time, Burton and Speke were unapologetic in their racism, with all of its attendant arrogance and ignorance, but they were sickened by the slave trade, which, Burton wrote, "had made a howling desert of the land," and took great pride in their country's efforts to end it.