Everything, all those great things, had happened so far away–or so it seemed to [Mma Ramotswe] at the time. The world was made to sound as if it belonged to other people–to those who lived...

That’s what imperialism is all about, shoving your language, religion, culture, and race down others’ throats and telling them that they’re beneath you – and it’s not unique to the West either.

Our effectiveness depends on our capacity to be audacious and astute, clear and appealing. I would hope that we can create a language more fearless and beautiful than that used by conformist writers to greet...

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.

How can you measure progress if you don’t know what it costs and who has paid for it? How can the “market” put a price on things – food, clothes, electricity, running water – when...

The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark. The longer they are kept apart—idea of thing, reality of thing—the wider the width, the deeper the depth,...

When World War II erupted, colonialism was at its apogee. The courde of the war, however, its symbolic undertones, would sow the seeds of the system’s defeat and demise. […] The central subject, the essence,...

The abiding western dominology can with religion sanction identify anything dark, profound, or fluid with a revolting chaos, an evil to be mastered, a nothing to be ignored. ‘God had made us master organizers of...

Someone can tell you all your life that you’re inferior, but it doesn’t matter until you accept it and allow for validation. Once validation takes place, it’s then that the colonial malaise sets in like...

Is everything forbidden us except to fold our arms? Poverty is not written in the stars; under development is not one of God’s mysterious designs.

The principle victims of British policies are Unpeople—those whose lives are deemed worthless, expendable in the pursuit of power and commercial gain. They are the modern equivalent of the ‘savages’ of colonial days, who could...

We ought not to speak only about the economics of globalization, but about the psychology of globalization. It’s like the psychology of a battered woman being faced with her husband again and being asked to...

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...

Maybe your college professor taught that the legacy of colonialism explains Third World poverty. That’s nonsense as well. Canada was a colony. So were Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. In fact, the richest country...

No one starts a war warning that those involved will lose their innocence – that children will definitely die and be forever lost as a result of the conflict; that the war will not end...

C” is for colonies Rightly we boastthat of all the great nationsGreat Britain has most!

And Aziz in an awful rage danced this way and that, not knowing what to do, and cried: “Down with the English anyhow. That’s certain. Clear out, you fellows, double quick, I say. We may...

The conquest of the earth is not a pretty thing.

[Internationa] Aid is just another praetorian business enterprise.

A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.

The tourists had money and we needed it; they only asked in return to be lied to and deceived and told that single most important thing, that they were safe, that their sense of security—national,...

Nationalist (forces around the world) could now more readily communicate and share their grievances, viewing themselves as similar groups, engaged in a common struggle for greater autonomy against control exerted from London or Paris.

If you are stealing something it’s better if it’s small and hideable or something you can eat quickly and be done with, like guavas. This way, people can’t see you with the thing to be...

Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?

One of the outstanding sources of resistance to imperial power in the Muslim world came from Sufi groups. While Sufi brotherhoods are generally known for a more quietist and mystic approach to Islam, they traditionally...

She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the...

As for the third Official Reason: exposing Western Hypocrisy – how much more exposed can they be? Which decent human being on earth harbors any illusions about it? These are people whose histories are spongy...

People like De Buys, they astonish me with their courage – or perhaps it is a lack in them; they cannot imagine. I think that is one way to be not afraid: in a covered...

My identity as Jewish cannot be reduced to a religious affiliation. Professor Said quoted Gramsci, an author that I’m familiar with, that, and I quote, ‘to know thyself is to understand that we are a...

I went to interview some of these early Jewish colonial zealots—written off in those days as mere ‘fringe’ elements—and found that they called themselves Gush Emunim or—it sounded just as bad in English—’The Bloc of...

I really knew nothing about the dancing habits of the Scottish. But I wanted to help. “I could teach them Indian folk dances,” I offered, scrounging my mind for school dances in gaudy garments.”Well, I’m...

ma chère penchons sur les filons géologiques (my dear let us lean on geographical veins)

repeat after me:1. our immigrant families are not just ‘homophobic’ they are also ‘colonized.’2. our parents have histories, genders, and sexualities, too.3. they are just as broken as we are (but we have the words...

Why did Africa let Europe cart away millions of Africa’s souls from the continent to the four corners of the wind? How could Europe lord it over a continent ten times its size? Why does...

Self-government is our right,” [Roger Casement] declared. “A thing born in us at birth; a thing no more to be doled out to us or withheld from us by another people than the right to...

When the media is controlled by people who runs the world, you are only going to get news that they want you to know. They will paint anther’s man country’s hero a tyrant, a dictator...

He was enraged and bitter and hoped for a personal meeting with Sarkozy where he would recount to him France’s colonial history in Africa and make him see reasons why her policy of assimilation was...

Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just ‘the occupation’ but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant...

Las épocas viejas nunca desaparecen completamente y todas las heridas, aun las más antiguas, manan sangre todavía.

Gandhiji was not born in freedom. All his life, except for a few months. lay within the framework of colonial rule. A good part of that life lay buried in prison cells. Yet he was...

A person has to ignore the larger social, economic, political, and religious climate of early North American colonialism to advance the Christian nation myth.

My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for...

In fact, the anti-Muslim stance of much of Hindu nationalism can be construed as partly a displaced hostility against the colonial power which could not be expressed directly because of the new legitimacy created within...

It seems more than a little patronizing for Westerners to lament the loss of the good old days when life in the Khumbu was so much simpler and more picturesque. Most of the people who...

According to Okonkwo, the British via its indirect rule system ensured that Africans saw their native leaders as the demons who betrayed their people. He called it a demonocracy

I regard anti-Semitism as ineradicable and as one element of the toxin with which religion has infected us. Perhaps partly for this reason, I have never been able to see Zionism as a cure for...

Her beauty cannot be measured with standards of a colonized mind

The colonialist’s existence is so closely aligned with that of the colonized that he will never be able to overcome the argument which states that misfortune is good for something. With all his power he...

Today everyone on our side knows that criminality is not the result of the Algerian’s congenital nature nor the configuration of his nervous system. The war in Algeria and wars of national liberation bring out...

[Taken from a BBC documentary]Tariq was born in Lahore, now in Pakistan, then part of British-ruled India, in 1943. A Catholic school education did nothing to shake his life-long atheism, which he shared with his...