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Colonialism Quotes

“I wish that Hochschild would come clean on the litany of other errors I catalogue in my essay: Conrad could not have seen any of the alleged rubber atrocities; Léopold did not burn his archives, and nothing was “locked away from outside view”; Kurtz’s head-strewn compound was not based on a Belgian official but on African warlords; Léon Fiévez’s African troops killed 100 warriors of local tribal chiefs who had reneged on a promise to supply food, not 100 hapless villagers who failed to turn in rubber; the trade surplus of the EIC reflected payments that went for infrastructure, administration, and security, not a slave economy.”

ColonialismCongoCongo Free StateAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostBruce GilleyKing Leopold Ii
Book:The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind
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“As I wrote, despite the malicious craft practiced by Hochschild and others, I am glad that an extensive documentary record of the EIC and of European colonies more generally survives, not that I expect any honest use of them in our current moral panic. Hochschild was merely an early entry into a genre that has since blossomed into an industry of scholars who “interrogate” the archives to cough up evidence of the evils of the West. There is of course no such documentary record of the horrific conditions the Europeans replaced, and in any case most Western readers would not buy a book on endemic venereal disease in Africa or stool disputes among the Kuba. A salacious tale on the Belgian king and his mistresses torturing black people to pay for their follies? Now you’re talking!”

ColonialismCongoCongo Free StateAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostBruce GilleyKing Leopold Ii
Book:The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind
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“I also do not begrudge Hochschild his millions, although, unlike him, I have untold praise for the capitalist system that produced them (he recently compared Amazon warehouses to slave plantations and in a 2016 book he lamented the failure of a socialist revolution in Spain). But to write history requires an immersion in the context, constraints, and worldviews of those involved.”

ColonialismCongoCongo Free StateAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostBruce GilleyKing Leopold Ii
Book:The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind
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“Hochschild just can’t seem to get over the fact that life was very, very different long ago. I, for one, am less ready to leap to condemnation for the petty abuses of the EIC, especially against people who are no longer alive to defend themselves. If he wants to join the Congo Reform Movement, so be it. It has been going on for over 100 years and is not likely to stop. When I call this white guilt porn, I do not intend it as polemic, but merely description.”

ColonialismCongoCongo Free StateAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostBruce GilleyKing Leopold Ii
Book:King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.
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“Much is at stake. In giving Hochschild its Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award in 2008, the American Historical Association claimed that King Leopold’s Ghost “broke through one of the most impenetrable silences of history” by revealing the “mass death” and “rampant atrocities” in the EIC. Be reminded that the AHA is the representative of professional historians in the United States, not the editorial board of Dissent magazine. The AHA went on to call the book “a key text in the historiography of colonial Africa for college and graduate students.” The AHA and Hochschild are also agreed on the really excellent quality of the 1619 Project, which Hochschild calls (micro-aggression notwithstanding) “masterful.” He has described the writing of history as uncovering “shame.” The AHA, warming to the idea, praised Hochschild’s “humanist agenda” with its mission “to combat inhumanity.” History should have no agenda other than uncovering the truth. It should combat only ignorance about the past. If this is the state of public history in the West, we are in a very bad place indeed.”

ColonialismCongoCongo Free StateAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostBruce GilleyKing Leopold Ii
Book:The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind
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“God who distributed the goods of the earth among the regions and peoples of the earth, has therefore made them no less in the service of all mankind. The human groups have no right to assume that the riches offered by the regions inhabited by them are solely for themselves. A fruitful division of labor must therefore be practiced, making these resources available to all members of humanity. The divine plan is disregarded, humanity is robbed of its future, when, through inability the backward peoples fail to exploit the treasures of their soil. As long as nobody has been set up with remedying this disorder, every state, provided it has the means, has the right to assume this task and if necessary to deprive the natives of the rights which it appears to have made common. welfare of all peoples.”

ColonialismCongoBelgian Congo
Author:Jozef-Ernest van Roey
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“The second, but more visible, untruth is the claim that for 23 years, EIC officials throughout the territory sponsored violent actions such as chopping off hands to force natives to collect rubber, leaving millions dead in a horror that should be directly compared to the Holocaust. There are about a dozen little cheats here, one embedded in the other like Russian nesting dolls.”

ColonialismCongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostBruce GilleyKing Leopold S GhostRed Rubber
Book:King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.
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“The obsession with seeking in Africa's colonial past the causes of all its miseries today is the work of people intimately convinced that Africa is doomed, that it is unable to take care of itself today, and that, finally, the fate of the Black will only improve if the White comes back to repair what he has done wrong: these “hidden Afro- pessimists “ are hiding, under gratuitous accusations, anger, or demand for reparation, their own disarray. This explains why their words are sterile, never accompanied by proposals for solutions to the problems they evoke. They are doing a lot of harm to Africa because they divert issues that have worth.”

ColonialismAfricaCongoAnti ColonialismMarcel Yabili
Book:The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba
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“As someone celebrated as an anti-colonial hero in the contemporary academy, it is often forgotten that Patrice Lumumba was an active “collaborator” in Belgian colonial rule by any measure: a postal clerk, the head of a local trade federation, and an insider in colonial society as head of Stanleyville’s Association des Évolués.”

ColonialismCongoBelgian CongoBruce GilleyPatrice Lumumba
Book:The Case for Colonialism: A Response to My Critics
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“Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, its because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this so strong, the experience so recent, that we can't quite bring ourselves to embrace this idea that you think so much of.”

CapitalismSlaveryResistanceOppressionColonialismExploitationCommodificationCapitalistsHuman Commodification
Book:A Small Place
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“The issue of reparations now comes clown not to descendants of one group paying money to descendants of another group. Rather, it comes down to people who look like the people to whom a wrong was done in history receiving money from people who look like the people who may have done the wrong. lt is hard to imagine anything more likely to rip apart a society than attempting a wealth transfer based on this principle.”

RacismSlaveryIdeologyColonialismReparationsBlmPostcolonialism
Book:The War on the West
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“As a scholar of Iraqi origin, the West not only reduces me into a token or an informant to write about Iraq, but even more damaging than that, I have to write about Iraq on their terms, if I am to be acknowledged or given the ‘honor’ of getting a place in their ‘prestigious’ institutions and publications. I understood this game early in my intellectual life and chose to opt out (to delink) to save my mind and to preserve my value and self-respect. I did not see a point in reaching ‘prestigious’ institutions while losing self-respect, knowing that I am not really writing, thinking, and doing knowledge conscientiously on my own terms.”

ColonialismExploitationImperialismDecolonizationAppropriationDecolonialityInformant
Author:Louis Yako
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“In certain cases, I learned that the biggest reason to read and engage with writers, activists, and artists is precisely because they are being dismissed, silenced, or ignored by the Western mainstream media. Likewise, very often, it is probably safe to refuse to pay too much attention to ideas, individuals, or groups promoted by the mainstream, because they are most likely (intentionally or unintentionally) serving a colonial or elitist agenda. In my experience, anyone promoted by mainstream media is almost always mediocre and their primary job is to promote mediocrity for public consumption.”

PowerMediaInstitutionsPropagandaMediocrityColonialismPublic OpinionAppropriationDecoloniality
Author:Louis Yako
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“Non-violent resistance supposes that the almighty enemy, at the very least, considers you to be a human being, capable of logically arguing why you disagree. It supposes that this enemy is ready to hear your demands and find common ground. Yes, Bamileke maquisards took up arms! But did they have a choice? Colonial masters feigned departure, but their cruel puppets continue to safeguard their interests through murder. We were cheated. Our struggle has been used to different ends. And, you will see, they will chop off any head that stands out, and then falsify our history. In fact, they won't; they will not even bother to record our history." "Who is "they?" I asked. "This 'they' is 'we’,” replied Louis. "We are the ones killing ourselves. Our killers are encouraged, trained, and funded by the former colonial power. But, and this is what makes it worse, we ourselves are the ones doing the dirty work with senseless enthusiasm," he added. That was how Cameroon—not just myself as an individual, or my village, Ombessa, or Bafia and Yaounde, the places where I had lived, but also this multi-layered, nuanced, bruised entity called my country—took shape in my mind.”

ColonialismBoko HaramCameroonDays Come And GoHemley BoumBafiaBamilekeMaquisardsOmbessaYaounde
Book:Days Come and Go
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“Yet history tells us that a deep financial and economic crisis has never occurred without a prior agrarian crisis, which tends to last even after the financial crisis abates. Consider the great depression of the inter-war period: it started not in 1929 as the conventional dating would have it, but years earlier from 1924–25 when global primary product prices started steadily falling. The reasons for this, in turn, were tied up with the dislocation of production in the belligerent countries during the war of inter-imperialist rivalry, the First World War of 1914–18. With the sharp decline in agricultural output in war-torn Europe there was expansion in agricultural output elsewhere which, with European recovery after the war, meant over-production relative to the lagging growth of mass incomes and of demand in the countries concerned. The downward pressure on global agricultural prices was so severe and prolonged that it led to the trade balances of major producing countries going into the red.”

ColonialismImperialismGreat DepressionFinancial CrisisGlobal SouthAgrarian Crisis
Book:The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
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“Terrorists and Thieves (Sonnet) Terrorists who manifested their destiny on stolen land, are banning immigrants! Thieves who built their AI empire, not on public domain data, but on stolen copyrighted material, are upset with other thieves stealing from them! More than the inhumanity it is the hypocrisy that is so astounding. I say astounding, but not really, it's just pathetic and disappointing. It's happening all over again, colonizers are spreading their tentacles, all the while being idolized as icons, instead of being held accountable for their ritualistic human rights violations. Parasites live off the labor of humans, and monkeys worship them as kings. This is neither innovation nor civilization, this is the jungle kingdom rebooting.”

LiteratureColonialismPersecutionCopyrightIllegal ImmigrantsNative AmericansGenerative AiChatgptColonizersHuman Rights Innovation
Book:Azad Earth Army: When The World Cries Blood
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“I,” he said, a faint note of derision in his voice, “am the least favored scion of our ruling house, House Mara Sant.” He was from Brontes, then. Which might explain the eyes…she thought again of certain differences, and suppressed a shudder. “I am a Prince of the Blood,” he continued, sounding both embittered and proud, “third in line for the Dragon Throne, and grand nephew to the Emperor. Owing to a…political dispute, I am now also an exile. Presented with a choice between resigning my commission in the na-vy and leaving to become governor of a mining planet and staying to face my uncle’s as-sassins….” He shrugged slightly, as if the choice were of no consequence. “A…political dispute?” “I gambled,” he said bluntly. “I lost.” “You seem…sanguine,” she remarked, surprise blunting the instinct to guard her tongue. “He shouldn’t have let me live.” That anyone could discuss their own murder with such cold calculation horrified her. He horrified her. She chewed her lip, digesting all that he’d told her: not merely a naval officer, but a prince—and a maverick one at that. She wondered what he could have done. “So you see,” he finished, “I’m no more free than you.” He laughed, then, but without humor. “We can be prisoners together. I am en route to a wretched planet called Tarsonis to assume governorship and as you have no other, more pressing engagement, you are coming with me.”

Science FictionColonialismImperialismExileScience Fiction RomanceMilitary Science Fiction
Book:The Price of Desire
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“What's a colony without its dusky natives? Where's the fun if they're all going to die off? Just a big chunk of desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the construction or the mining--wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe it's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets... Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and the cannabis and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts... No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets....”

ColonialismColonial Society
Book:Gravity’s Rainbow
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“Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, its because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this so strong, the experience so recent, that we can't quite bring ourselves to embrace this idea that you think so much of. As for hat we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods of time over which my ancestors held sway, no documentation of complex civilisations, is any comfort to me. Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to me, what I became after I met you.”

StruggleCapitalismAngerFrustrationCapitalistColonialismIndigenousDecolonizationPerserveranceIndigenous Feminism
Book:A Small Place
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“Traversing borders is a threat – and in the colonial mindset, the borders of class and nationality are at one with the borders of gender. Binary gender is a colonial and capitalist project, what feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa called the ‘absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other’.”

ColonialismTerfGender Binary
Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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“The theft of brown women's narratives is not only an injustice placed on them, but also one extended to their male counterparts; by insisting they need to be liberated from their 'barbaric' civilization, Laura [Bush] summoned the colonial assertion that brown women need saving from brown men, when, in actuality, brown women have suffered at the hands of white men more than at those of any other oppressor in history.”

FeminismRacismIslamColonialismMuslimIslamophobiaMuslim WomenWhite Feminism
Book:Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age Story
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“Claiming the right to be nasty in resistance to gendered respectability politics is often done by women who continue to be positioned as respectable by the world at large. And the ‘respectability’ of bourgeois white women has been central to colonial narratives that construct us as superior to women marginalised by race and class. Affronts to this ‘respectability’ have justified fatal violence against men of colour. This position of race and class supremacy means that our anger may not always be as radical or transgressive as we might like.”

ViolenceAngerColonialismRespectabilityWhite Feminism
Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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“Instead of interrogating intersecting systems, politically white feminism roots violence either in aberrant or all male bodies. The mainstream focus on ‘bad men’, and the reactionary focus on male biology, do not account for how capitalist economic predation and misogynist sexual predation go hand in hand. They do not account for how this interplay is racialised, domestically and geopolitically.”

CapitalismColonialismSexual ViolenceWhite Feminism
Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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“With the absorption of each native state, the (East India) company official John Sullivan observed in 1840s: "The little court disappears--the capital decays--trade languishes--the capital decays--the people are impoverished--the Englishman flourishes, and acts like a sponge, drawing up riches from the banks of the Ganges, and squeezing them down upon the banks of the Thames.”

HistoryIndiaColonialismExploitationColonisationBritish India
Book:An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India
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“I'm afraid, you're right...though not only of them. We'll lose everything, including the way we live,' Hussein said. 'And these young people will lose even more. One day they'll make them spit on all that we know, and will make them recite their laws and their story of the world as if it were the holy word. When they come to write about us, what will they say? That we made slaves.”

HistoryOppressionColonialismAfricaEmpireColonisation
Book:Paradise
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“Not all influences of colonialism were necessarily bad. Along with enslavement, subjugation, exploitation, loss of cultural heritage, and repression, colonists also brought modern scientific methods in fields such as medicine and agriculture. Note that this can be no apologia for colonialism, because these advances could have been gained without the societies' becoming colonised, as in Japan.”

DevelopmentEconomicsColonialismColonisation
Book:Economic development
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“But I learned from these new books that Southerners think we are really rather sad. They have an idea of a people dwelling on a mountain, inbred, lonely, mysterious; that we ritually climb and descend, and make sacrifices, and burn eternal flames, and send bridal parties from village to village in the spring so men like Daila can impregnate women like me, all in order to placate something implacable. They see our culture as rich, in the same way perhaps that a seam of ancient ore is rich — because of compression and repression. They imagine that we drink a lot, even more than we do (and it is a thing I learned from the bar, that they drink as much as we, that every culture that’s discovered alcohol drinks too much) and that we are poorer than we are because only a few of us sell anything to them. A melancholy drunken land, a land of storytellers, a land of sly jokes, an Asam-hating land, and nothing like the land I remembered. It was as if someone had constructed a scaffolding around us, and then removed us and written only about the scaffolding. The more I read, the more the materials of the scaffolding — splintered wood, narrow pipes of metal — slid into the hollows of my bones. I knew that the next time I went to the mountain, I would have a stranger’s mind in mine. Though I walked in streets I had known since girlhood, I would never again be able to step upon them without an erudite word in my head and a bracing of metal in my marrow.”

ColonialismOrientalismOthering
Book:The Breath of the Sun
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“Dedicated to Hitler (Sonnet of Lesser Evil) I'll write a book of german sonnets, and dedicate it to Adolf Hitler. The very thought makes you mad right! I feel the same way when you glorify Churchill as savior. The west has systematically peddled morons and monkeys as kings heroic, white suffering is human suffering, while the colored belong on national geographic. Sure every society has its own troubles, All of humanity has its inhumanity. But the west doesn't have the high ground, to pass judgment on ethics and morality. If morality did have a scale, West would be scraping the bottom. If this tickles you the wrong way, You are what is wrong with our western world.”

SlaveryColonialismWhite SupremacyHate CrimeSystemic RacismBlack History MonthNeonazisWhite NationalismDomestic TerrorismWhite Terrorism
Book:Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets
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“Prior to colonialism, black Africans seem to have found their blackness perfectly beautiful and normal, unsurprisingly. But also, by making whiteness the colour of oppression, the colour that defined a person’s right to own other human beings, to rape and kill and steal with impunity, white supremacists had paradoxically opened up the way for blackness to become the colour of freedom, of revolution and of humanity. This is why it’s absurd to compare black nationalism and white nationalism; not because black people are inherently moral, but because the projects of the two nationalisms were entirely different. This difference is why the black nationalist Muhammad Ali could still risk his life, give up the prime years of his career and lose millions of dollars in solidarity with the non-black, non-American people of Vietnam. It’s also why Ali could show as much sympathy as he did to the white people of Ireland in their quarrels with Britain, despite him saying, somewhat rhetorically, that 'The white man is the devil’.”

ColonialismWhite NationalismBlack Nationalism
Book:Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire
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