Category Archives: Colonialism

West Papuan Indigenous people call for KitKat boycott over alleged ecocide

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Thousands of acres of rainforest is being cleared to produce palm oil, used in popular Nestlé and Mondelēz brands

West Papua’s Indigenous people have called for a boycott of KitKat, Smarties and Aero chocolate, Oreo biscuits and Ritz crackers, and the cosmetics brands Pantene and Herbal Essences, over alleged ecocide in their territory.

All are products that contain palm oil and are made, say the campaigners, by companies that source the ingredient directly from West Papua, which has been under Indonesian control since 1963 and where thousands of acres of rainforest are being cleared for agriculture.

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Ancestral remains should no longer be displayed in UK museums, say MPs

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Remains brought to Britain as part of colonialism, such as Egyptian mummies, should be repatriated, a report says

The public display of human remains in the UK, including the ancient Egyptian mummies in the British Museum, is offensive and should be stopped, according to a group of MPs.

A report by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Afrikan Reparations (APPG-AR) said it should become an offence to sell ancestral remains or publicly display them without consent.

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Campaigners celebrate court ruling to ‘decolonise’ Kampala

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After a five-year campaign, landmarks and streets honouring British colonialists will be renamed to reflect Ugandan culture

Campaigners have welcomed a court ruling to remove British colonial monuments from Uganda’s capital, Kampala, and to rename streets that honour “crooks and historical figureheads”.

In last week’s high court ruling, Justice Musa Ssekaana directed the city authorities to remove the names of British figures from streets, monuments and other landmarks.

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UK stalls Chagos Islands deal until Trump administration can ‘consider detail’

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Future of Diego Garcia military base should be considered before handover to Mauritius signed off, No 10 says

The UK government will not sign off a deal to hand back the Chagos Islands to Mauritius until Donald Trump’s administration has had a chance to consider the future of the joint military base, Downing Street has confirmed.

Allies of the US president-elect have been critical of the deal because of the implications for the strategically important Diego Garcia base, with concerns that it could bolster Chinese interests in the Indian Ocean.

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Court ruling on Belgium’s conduct in colonial Africa hailed as turning point

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Verdict of crimes against humanity for kidnap of mixed-race children could pave way for wider justice, activists say

A historic court ruling that found Belgium guilty of crimes against humanity during its colonial rule of central Africa has been hailed as a turning point that could pave the way for compensation and other forms of justice.

Belgium’s court of appeal ruled last month that the “systematic kidnapping” of mixed-race children from their African mothers in Belgian-ruled Congo, Rwanda and Burundi was a crime against humanity. The case was brought by five women who were removed from their Congolese mothers as small children between 1948 and 1953, and who now live in Belgium and France. Each was awarded €50,000 (£42,000) in damages.

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Danish king changes coat of arms amid row with Trump over Greenland

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Design shows intent to keep control of Faroe Islands and Greenland – which Trump says he would like the US to buy

The Danish king has shocked some historians by changing the royal coat of arms to more prominently feature Greenland and the Faroe Islands – in what has also been seen as a rebuke to Donald Trump.

Less than a year since succeeding his mother, Queen Margrethe, after she stood down on New Year’s Eve 2023, King Frederik has made a clear statement of intent to keep the autonomous Danish territory and former colony within the kingdom of Denmark.

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Belgium found guilty of crimes against humanity in colonial Congo

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Court said five women were victims of ‘systematic kidnapping’ by state over forced removal from mothers as small children

The Belgian state has been found guilty of crimes against humanity for the forced removal of five mixed-race children from their mothers in colonial Congo.

In a long-awaited ruling issued on Monday, Belgium’s court of appeal said that five women, born in the Belgian Congo and now in their 70s, had been victims of “systematic kidnapping” by the state when they were removed from their mothers as small children and sent to Catholic institutions because of their mixed-race origins.

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Keir Starmer urged to ‘engage’ on reparations at Commonwealth summit

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Call from head of Caribbean reparations body comes as Bahamas foreign minister claims UK PM will change his position

Britain has a legal and moral case to answer over its historical role in slavery, the chair of the Caribbean’s slavery reparation commission has said, as Keir Starmer continues to reject calls to put the issue on the agenda at the Commonwealth summit.

Responding to the British prime minister’s insistence to “look forward” rather than have “very long endless discussions about reparations on the past” when he meets 55 other country leaders on Friday, the distinguished Caribbean historian Sir Hilary Beckles, who chairs the Caribbean governments’ reparations body, articulated the region’s call to the British government and institutions to “engage in a compassionate, intergenerational strategy to support postcolonial reconstruction”.

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Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

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Claim raises idea explorer was from community expelled by his Spanish patrons, but experts view it with caution

A 20-year genetic investigation of the remains of Christopher Columbus has turned conventional historical wisdom on its head by concluding that the explorer whose voyage to the New World changed the course of global history may have been a Spanish Jew rather than a son of Genoa.

The claim raises the intriguing prospect that the man who played a central part in the creation of Spain’s mighty empire hailed from the very community that his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, expelled from their kingdom in the same year Columbus reached the Americas.

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DNA study confirms Christopher Columbus’s remains are entombed in Seville

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Scientists have ‘definitively’ proved identity of remains – with navigator’s precise origins to be revealed

Scientists in Spain claim to have solved the two lingering mysteries that cling to Christopher Columbus more than five centuries after the explorer died: are the much-travelled remains buried in a magnificent tomb in Seville Cathedral really his? And was the navigator who changed the course of world history really from Genoa – as history has long claimed – or was he actually Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Jewish or Portuguese?

The answer to the first question is yes. The answer to the second is … wait until Saturday.

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Lammy defends Chagos deal, saying it saves important UK-US military base

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Foreign secretary says status quo not sustainable as Tory MPs accuse Labour of giving away key asset

David Lammy has hailed the decision to return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius as a deal to save a strategically important UK-US military base, after accusations from opposition MPs that a key asset was being given away.

The government announced last week that it was going to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, ending years of bitter dispute over Britain’s last African colony, but the military base on Diego Garcia will remain under UK control.

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Britain to return Chagos Islands to Mauritius ending years of dispute

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Agreement to hand back UK’s last African colony follows 13 rounds of negotiations and international pressure

The UK has agreed to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, ending years of bitter dispute over Britain’s last African colony.

The agreement will allow a right of return for Chagossians, who the UK expelled from their homes in the 1960s and 1970s, in what has been described as a crime against humanity and one of the most shameful episodes of postwar colonialism.

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Mexico’s snub to King Felipe rekindles colonialism row with Spain

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President-elect refuses to invite Spanish king to her inauguration after lack of apology for crimes of conquest

A festering diplomatic row between Mexico and Spain has been reopened after the Latin American country’s leftwing president-elect refused to invite King Felipe to her inauguration because of his failure to apologise for crimes committed against Mexico’s Indigenous people during the conquest 500 years ago.

In 2019, Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador wrote to King Felipe and Pope Francis, calling for them to apologise for the “abuses” of the conquest and the colonial period.

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Candidates to lead Commonwealth urge reparations for slavery and colonialism

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Three African contenders for role of secretary general call for financial measures or reparative justice

The three candidates to be the next secretary general of the Commonwealth have called for reparations for countries that were affected by slavery and colonisation.

The candidates from the Gambia, Ghana and Lesotho expressed their support for either financial reparations or “reparative justice”, as they made their pitches to lead the 56-country organisation at a debate hosted by the Chatham House thinktank in London on Wednesday.

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Historian hails Trinidad plan to remove Columbus ships from coat of arms

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PM’s proposal to replace ships with steelpan wins applause from his party but some in capital voice opposing views

The government of Trinidad and Tobago wants to remove a depiction of three ships used by Christopher Columbus from its coat of arms, in a move hailed by a historian as important in addressing historical inaccuracies and shrugging off colonial identities.

The Caribbean country’s prime minister, Keith Rowley, announced a plan on 18 August to replace the ships with a representation of Trinidad and Tobago’s national instrument, the steelpan.

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US steps up sanctions against Israeli settlers and ‘outposts’ in occupied West Bank

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Targeting ‘outposts’ suggests Biden administration prepared to take some action to confront blatant land grab

The US has stepped up efforts to target violent Israeli settlers, adding new individuals and organisations to a growing sanctions list and warning banks to check transactions linked to all Israeli “outposts” in the occupied West Bank.

The new sanctions cover the far-right group Lehava, already listed by the UK, and two founding members of Tsav9, a campaign group that blocked aid from reaching Gaza. The new measures also target outposts, suggesting the Biden administration is prepared to take at least some steps to confront Israel’s creeping land grab on the West Bank.

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Rise of far right makes reparations debate tough, says Cape Verde president

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José Maria Neves says governments should still try to have such conversations and build solutions using diplomatic corridors

Cape Verde’s president, José Maria Neves, said the rise of rightwing populism has made it difficult to hold a serious debate about colonial reparations but argued that should not stop governments from having those conversations behind closed doors.

In an interview with the news site Brasil Já, published on Wednesday, Neves said debating reparations in the “public arena” could lead to more political polarisation in countries such as Cape Verde’s former coloniser, Portugal, where the far right is on the rise.

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Manahahtáanung or Manhattan? Tribal representatives call for apology for Dutch settlement of New York City

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As new exhibition opens in Amsterdam exploring the settlement of North America, original Manhattanites demand apology

Representatives for some of the Lenape people have called for an apology and reparations for the 17th-century Dutch “settling” of New Amsterdam, the place that is now New York.

Precisely four centuries after the Dutch established a colony at the mouth of the Hudson River, some descendants of Indigenous Americans believe it is time for a fuller story of the wars on their people, slavery, exploitation and dispersal.

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Call for port extension to be halted as genocide remains are found on Namibia’s Shark Island

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Researchers say more bodies of Herero and Nama people from early 20th century concentration camp could be in waters around port

The Namibian authorities are being urged to halt plans to extend a port on the Shark Island peninsula after the discovery of unmarked graves and artefacts relating to the Herero and Nama genocide.

Forensic Architecture, a non-profit research agency, said it had located sites of executions, forced labour, imprisonment and sexual violence that occurred when the island was used by the German empire as a concentration camp between 1905 and 1907.

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Dorset auction house withdraws Egyptian human skulls from sale

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MP says trade in remains is ‘gross violation of human dignity’, as skulls from Pitt Rivers collection removed

An auction house has withdrawn 18 ancient Egyptian human skulls from sale after an MP said selling them would perpetuate the atrocities of colonialism.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Afrikan reparations, believes the sale of human remains for any purposes should be outlawed, adding that the trade was “a gross violation of human dignity”.

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