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Colonisation Quotes

Browse 35 quotes about Colonisation.

Colonisation Quotes

“MBEKI Pierre, born in 1905, Scotland. MANDELA Giovanna Rosaria l, born in the 1800s, Italy. ZUMA Andreas, born in 1750, Pologne. TWALO July, born in 1850, USA. MALEMA Jannis, born in 1750, Latvia. These are Surnames of key people in Africa. But they are also a few examples of how people really received their Surnames in Africa ...through colonisation.”

“On a global scale, the international diaspora of Filipinos must be seen in the context of our search for a home. For many, the economic conditions of the Philippines can hardly be called home—pushing hundreds of thousands of men and women (primarily) to seek economic relief elsewhere in order to provide a home for the families they left behind in the Philippines. This diaspora must also be seen in the historical context of our imbalance as a result of colonialism/imperialism and the displacement of the self through negation by the master’s narratives. That this diaspora is perceived by the Philippine government as its own version of “foreign aid” is symptomatic of a consciousness that remains uncritical of its marginal situatedness. The paradox of the “colonized taking care of the colonizer” is being played out in hospitals and convalescent homes, where Filipino nurses abound; in Europe and in the United States, where Filipino nannies and domestic workers are taking care of other people’s children It is evident in Japan’s Filipino entertainers and in Denmark and Australia’s Filipino mail-order brides, who provide caretaking services, especially to men. This is the most stark and depressing legacy of colonization as a patriarchal legacy—the exploitation of women”

“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.”

“He had scooped up another handful of sand and stared at each grain as it fell through his fingers. 'You are like these. Each a trifling speck. A hundred, many hundreds—what matter? Cast them into the air. You cannot even find them when they land upon the ground. But there are more grains than you can count. There is no end to them. You will pour across this land, and we will be smothered. Your stone walls, your dead trees, the hooves of your strange beasts trampling the clam beds. My uncle sees these things, here and now. And in his trance, he sees that worse is coming. You walls will rise everywhere until they shut us out. You will turn the land upside down with your ploughs until all the hunting grounds are gone. This, and more, my uncle sees.”

“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.”

“... his future, had either been sold or laid to waste by his parents' generation, trapping him in a perpetual adolescence that was further heightened by the infantilising unreality of the Internet as it encroached upon, and colonised, real life - 'real life', Tony thought, with bitter air quotes, for late capitalism would admit nothing 'real' beyond the logic of late capitalism itself, having declared self-interest the only universal, and profit motive the only absolute, and deriding everything that did not serve its ends as either a contemptible weakness or a fantasy.”

“The government and the education system failed to explain to white Britain that, as the academic Adam Elliot-Cooper puts it, we had not come to Britain, but 'rather that Britain had come to us'. They did not explain that the wealth of Britain, which made the welfare state and other class ameliorations possible, was derived in no small part from the coffee and tobacco, cotton and diamonds, gold and sweat and blood and death of the colonies.”

“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.”

“The questions must be, what were the effects on the people as their lands were stolen and desecrated, relationships destroyed, children taken and violated, lore and ceremonies devalued and dishonoured? What long-term impacts have these separate yet inter-related tragedies had on the survivors? Answers to these questions will provide answers to present distressful circumstances.”

“The drive to live in the master’s house is also symbolic of the desire to become like the master. Our colonized consciousness has convinced us that to be is to be like the master. To be Filipino is not good enough—or so we we have been taught (or coerced) to believe. It is a reflection of the internalization of the dark shadows projected by the colonizer onto the colonized. These are shadows from which there is no escape, shadows that will keep haunting until they are withdrawn, atoned for, and integrated within the colonizer’s self”

“The traumas associated with colonization that lasted almost 400 years scarred us all, regardless of our nativity, language, class, or gender. Trauma fragments and fractures the essence of our being and self-knowledge; it disconnects us from each other.” Regardless of your nativity, your memories are colonized. You are born into trauma without an initial understanding of or hermeneutic for your fragmented self and you must work diligently just to explain your own life—to recognize and name your scars, to educate yourself about your specific cultural history and uncover its connections to your subjectivity. The ideologies of your family are colonized, and even your own thoughts and actions are colonized, despite your initial unawareness of the systematic forces at work in the simple procedures of your daily life.”

“In the initial stages, when contact between the two peoples might be limited to scouting out the possibilities of invasion, or trading with them for their furs or other produce, there is less need or cause to demean the inhabitants as savages or to regard them as beasts. However, the descriptions are radically different once dispossession becomes the aim or when the natives violently resist the intrusion of explorers.”

“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.”

“The idea of discovery and consequent possession is used by those with neither the intelligence nor sensitivity to see the value in lives other than their own. Anyway, there is no need to possess anything when there is access to everything. It is only when someone says that your mother belongs to them that there is a problem.”

“We here goe to cause preach the Gospel where it was never heard, and not to subdue but to civilize the Savages, for their ruine could give us neither glory nor benefit, since in place of fame it would breed infamie, and would defraud us of many able bodies, that hereafter (besides the Christian dutie in saving their soules) by themselves or by their Posteritie may serve to many good uses, when by our meanes they shall learn lawful Trades, and industries.”

“What a fool he’d been to think fair play counted for something with the men who were in charge of the Island! Officially of course, that was only Saunders and the Commissioner, but Mr Wade was in charge of the all-important government ferry from the mainland, and Mr Gubb was in charge of the stores that arrived. They were all in it together, behaving like the rulers of kingdoms he had read about as a child. He gave a bitter laugh. And what a kingdom it was! This miserable collection of society’s outcasts and junior officials who dared not oppose their authority!”

“La colonisation a partout abouti à des situations humaines dramatiques : en juxtaposant aux conflits de classe des conflits de race, en les alimentant même, en opposant aujourd'hui des victimes à d'autres victimes, en transformant des classes laborieuses en classes dominantes, puisque blanches, dès lors qu'elles étaient "exportées" dans les possessions ultramarines, en interrompant des processus politiques en cours et parfois en les figeant, elle a façonné des sociétés fragmentées, déchirées, apparemment irréconciliables, diamétralement opposées à l'idéal de sociétés métissées vanté dans les discours officiels. Face à ces difficultés, plutôt que d'interroger sa propre histoire coloniale et la pertinence de sa présence outre-mer, la France a bricolé des formes institutionnelles qui n'ont rien réglé, bien au contraire, dans le but d'assouvir ses rêves de grandeur.”

“The native intellectual had learnt from his masters that the individual ought to express himself fully [and that his] only wealth is individual thought. [...] the people during the struggle for freedom will discover the falseness of the theory [...] the interest of one will be the interests of all, for in concrete fact everyone will be discovered by the troops, everyone will be massacred - or everyone will be saved”