Quotes About Colonialism

An estimated 60,000 out of the 80,000 Herero were in fact killed before the general was recalled to Berlin.122

Out of 160 physicians in Nigeria in the early 1950s, 76 were Yorubas, 49 were Ibos and only one was Hausa-Fulani.

By 1912, the British Empire had a population of more than 440 million people, of whom only 10 percent lived in the British Isles.41

not one private bank was opened in Dublin in the quarter century before 1793.

Through a misunderstanding one native visitor was shot on board one of the ships, and a dozen others were shot ashore, while the Europeans got off with the loss of one tablecloth and of a few hats which were stolen while they had them on their heads.

We are critical of the priests who burned the paper books of the Aztecs because contemporary Europe looked down upon the non-Christian Americans and wanted to destroy their heathen beliefs. But we ourselves have so little esteem for these same beliefs that although the most important ones were recorded by the early Spaniards, we reject them as the fables of primitive nations.

He [Stanley] had stated that he longed to do something wonderful for the African tribes along the Congo, and instead, as would become all too apparent, had set them up for a terrible fate. In 1877 he came down the great river as the first European ever to do so, declaring his hope that the Congo should become like `a torch to those who sought to do good'. Instead, it became the torch that attracted the archexploiter King Leopold II of Belgium.

They didn't know the first thing about Diem's tyranny, or the nature of Vietnamese nationalism, or the long colonialism of the French—this was all too damned complicated, it required some reading—but no matter, it was a war to stop the Communists, plain and simple, which was how they liked things, and you were a treasonous pussy if you had second thoughts about killing or dying for plain and simple reasons. I

So, in Melting Pot the children (about a third of whom were kids of color) sang the line, America was the new world and Europe was the old, in one stroke eradicating the narratives of indigenous persons for whom America was hardly new, and any nonwhite kids whose old worlds had been in Africa or Asia, not Europe.

When they weren't running meat—or rum—they worked as salt miners or piloted small boats along the coast. These highland Saint-Dominguans, along with more recent white immigrants, also from the middle and lower classes, were worlds removed from the sugar kings, businessmen

THE original Alexandre Dumas was born in 1762, the son of "Antoine Alexandre de l'Isle," in the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue. Antoine was a nobleman in hiding from his family and from the law, and he fathered the boy with a black slave. Later Antoine would discard his alias and reclaim his real name and title—Alexandre Antoine Davy, the Marquis de la Pailleterie—and bring his black son across the ocean to live in pomp and luxury near Paris.

Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood.

Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle.

whether imbued with or struggling against conventional Western views of benighted Africa, their protagonists found the continent to be as empty as that collection plate—a vessel waiting for whatever copper and silver imagination was pleased to place there.

At one stop in New Zealand, an Englishman bartered for sex. He was presented with a boy; when he complained, he was presented with another. The English related this incident with amusement, as a cruel joke. But the Maori may have supposed that homosexuality was the English norm. How else to account for the absence among them of women and children?

Cuba must be ours," declared Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis. He also wanted the Yucatán peninsula, so that the Gulf of Mexico would become "a basin of water belonging to the United States." His fellow Mississippian, Senator Albert Brown, coveted Central America. "I want these countries for the spread of slavery," he said. "I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our Divine Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth.

Freedom is for the educated people who fought for it. We were slaves of the English, now we will be slaves of the educated Indians—or the Pakistanis.' Iqbal

Virginia was seen as a convenient place to send the poor and unemployed and to dump some of the criminals who infested London's crowded streets and alleyways.

There will never be slaves in Britain,' Godalming continued, 'but those who stay warm will naturally serve us, as the excellent Bessie has just served me. Have a care, lest you wind up the equivalent of some damned regimental water-bearer.' In India, I knew a water-bearer who was a better man than most.

England, with its upsetting history of colonialism. It never did seem quite right to Norris, the British being so utterly British no matter where they were. One ought to adapt, he believes. One ought to accommodate. Change, after all, is the great elixir of life.

The niggers, who else?" He sounded disappointed. "We had to show them who was boss, you see. There was this Belgian captain. He used Negro heads as decorations around his flower bed. To each his own.

They are anxious to have everything the white man has even if it is harmful.

No thought was given to the history of Africa except so far as it had been a field of exploitation for the Caucasian. You might study the history as it was offered in our system from the elementary school throughout the university, and you would never hear Africa mentioned except in the negative.

In my mind I think Africa is one of the few places that can be infantilized and denigrated freely without consequences or due regard to local peoples' sensitivities.