Quotes about colonialism

In the Americas the white man never referred to the past but only to the future. The white man didn’t seem to understand he had no future here because he had no past, no spirits of ancestors here. (Part Two, Book Two: Reign of Fire-Eye Macaw)

The ancestors had called Europeans “the orphan people” and had noted that as with orphans taken in by selfish or coldhearted clanspeople, few Europeans had remained whole. They failed to recognize the earth was their mother. Europeans were like their first parents, Adam and Eve, wandering aimlessly because the insane God who had sired them had abandoned them. (Part Two, Book One: Reign of Death-Eye Dog)

Racism... is the highest expression of the colonial system and one of the most significant features of the colonialist.

The most serious blow suffered by the colonized is being removed from history and from the community. Colonization usurps any free role in either war or peace, every decision contributing to his destiny and that of the world, and all cultural and social responsibility.

Your policy here, and in all the Arab states, has been to get out as much oil as you could, before the indigenous peoples looked around and noticed that they were living in the twentieth century.

The famous dictum which states that all men are equal will find its illustration in the colonies only when the colonized subject states he is equal to the colonist.

The white man is very clever. He came quietly with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.

They looked beyond the laughing face of the whiteman and suddenly saw a long line of other red strangers who carried not the Bible, but the sword. The iron snake... was quickly wriggling towards Nairobi for a thorough exploitation of the hinterland.

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

France built its best colony on a principle of exclusion, and failed; England reversed the system, and succeeded.

I wish that these barbarians would rise up and teach us a lesson, so that we would learn to respect them.

The British had the gall to call Robert Clive 'Clive of India' as if he belonged to the country, when all he really did was to ensure that much of the country belonged to him.