297 Quotes About Colonialism

Jeg går ikke rundt til daglig og føler bitterhed over at det forholder sig sådan. Men i dag, mens jeg ser den forlorne ceremoni og mærker lugten af krudtrøg fra kanonerne, er det som om noget gærer i mig. En vrede som jeg ikke kan rette mod noget bestemt, kun mod en fortid som var uretfærdig, og en fremtid der virker usikker. Vores skæbne som magtfulde mænds omsættelige valuta.

...when I say "I am filled with rage," the criminal says, "But why?"And when I blow things up and make life generally unlivable for the criminal (is my life not unlivable too?) the criminal is shocked, surprised. But nothing can erase my rage- not an apology, not a sum of money, not the death of the criminal- for this wrong can never be made right, and only the impossible can make me still: can a way be found to make what happened not have happened?

The wrongs of our past have resurfaceddespite all we did tovanquish the tracesmy language is taintedwith all that we stole to control and erase and replacein a country still rich with the profits of slavery. As yet, there's been no reparations.- Europe is Lost

This is one of the consequences of a superior education, you see. In this independent, hundred-per-cent-empowered and fully and totally indigenous blacker-than-black country, a superior education is one that the whites would value, and as whites do not value local languages at the altar of what the whites deem supreme. So it was in colonial times, and so it remains, more than thirty years later.

The white man's cruelest trick was not to conquer or even enslave, but simply to soften, weaken and corrupt every culture or people he encountered until the lost the will to be themselves anymore.

What had happened was that the formal pattern of black-and-white, mistress-and-servant, had been broken by the personal relation; and when a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.

Somewhat paradoxically, the more that Africans and their descendants assimilated cultural materials from colonial society, the less human they became in the minds of the colonists.

Périssent les colonies si elles nous en coûtent l'honneur, la liberté.(Perish the colonies if they cost us Honor, Liberty.)

All around the world, tourist boards advertise trips to Britain with images of the great castles and cathedrals that occupy the commanding heights of our landscape. They seem timeless and typically English. It is rarely mentioned that they are predominately French - proud monuments to the invasion that signals the end of England's 'dark age'.