Artist Annalee Davis was walking in fields once used for sugarcane in her Barbados homeland when she spotted unfamiliar plants. “I was taught to see them as weeds but now I understand their value offering biodiversity to exhausted land and their historical use in bush medicine.” Davis started pressing and using specially mixed Victorian paint to draw these plants on old plantation ledger pages. Colonialism wiped out Barbados’s biodiversity in the 17th century by replacing local vegetation with the monoculture of intensively farmed fields of sugarcane, but wild plants are proliferating again. The series is now on show at Haarlem Artspace, Derbyshire, until 11 October as part of re:rural. “I want to use the plants to learn to listen to the land in another way and acknowledge its trauma,” she says.
Category Archives: Colonialism
‘Decolonise and rename’ streets of Uganda and Sudan, activists urge
Campaigners target statues of slave owners and roads named after imperial armies as protests spread to Africa
Campaigners have asked Uganda’s parliament to order the removal of monuments to British colonialists and to rename streets commemorating imperial military forces.
Uganda gained independence in 1962 after almost 70 years as a British protectorate, and more than 5,000 people have signed a petition to “decolonise and rename” the dozens of statues and street names which remain.
Continue reading...Germans know that toppling a few statues isn’t enough to confront the past | Géraldine Schwarz
Britain should acknowledge that millions were complicit in the crimes of empire, just as Germans like my grandfather enabled nazism
Before the second world war, remembering history served only to glorify nations, to stir up revanchism or to sanctify heroes. Then Germany invented Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the attempt to deal with its Nazi shame by collectively confronting the unspeakable crimes of the Third Reich rather than evading them. This process, which started at the end of the 60s after two decades of collective amnesia, allowed something positive to grow from a negative legacy: Germany’s rehabilitation and reconstruction into one of the strongest democracies in the world.
Germany’s culture of remembrance could inspire countries such as Britain which have trouble understanding that in order to transform the weight of the past into wealth, it must confront history’s shadows – not ignore them.
Continue reading...What black America means to Europe – podcast
Many have attempted to claim that ‘things are better here’ for black people than in the US. This ignores both Europe’s colonial past and its own racist present. By Gary Younge
Continue reading...Lenin statue to be unveiled in Germany despite legal fight
Gelsenkirchen bucks global trends with new monument as other cities confront relics of colonial past
While a global row rages over the controversial pasts of historical figures immortalised as statues, on Saturday a divisive new monument to the former Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin will be unveiled in Germany.
More than 30 years after the communist experiment on German soil that followed the second world war ended, the tiny Marxist-Leninist party of Germany (MLPD) will install Lenin’s likeness in the western city of Gelsenkirchen.
Continue reading...Is this the end for colonial-era statues? – video
Statues of colonialists and brutal leaders have been toppled by protesters or removed by governments in recent weeks as campaigns to bring down monuments to historical figures tainted by racism and slavery spread around the world.
In Belgium, during Black Lives Matter protests, numerous statues of King Leopold II, whose brutal rule of Congo caused an estimated 10 million deaths through murder, starvation and disease, were defaced and covered in red paint. While in the UK, Oxford University’s Oriel College voted in favour of removing its statue of the Victorian imperialist Cecil Rhodes.
In response to the latest action, the historian David Olusoga looks at the significance of these statues and examines the impact they have had on the victims of colonialists and imperialists, as well as the cost borne by their descendants
- I shared my home with Edward Colston for more than 20 years. Good riddance
- 'White guilt on its own won't fix racism': decolonising Britain's schools
Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds among UK banks that had links to slavery
Many bank directors received compensation after slavery was made illegal in 1833
The slave trade was abolished in the British Empire in 1807 but it was not until 1833 that the Slavery Abolition Act finally banned the ownership of other human beings. However, 46,000 slave owners continued to benefit financially as the subsequent Slave Compensation Act provided £20m in payments – a sum worth billions in 2020 terms. Despite the name of the act, the former slaves were not compensated.
University College London’s Legacies of British Slave Ownership project shows that 10% to 20% of Britain’s wealthy can be identified as having had significant links to slavery. The amount of money borrowed to pay off slave owners was so large that the government only repaid it fully in 2015. Companies with links to slavery in their past include:
Continue reading...Britain’s urban fabric comes under spotlight shone by BLM protests
Force of history demands re-evaluation of colonial statues and street names
Cities have always been about apportioning and memorialising power; about writing force into space. Britain’s colonial and imperial past is inscribed into the bricks and mortar of every city and town in the country. Mostly this hidden text of power relations and wealth acquisition lies dormant in the half-forgotten significance of street names, in the knotty iconography of grand facades, in the barely read inscriptions on memorials and sculptures, in the nomenclature of grand public buildings. Forming the backdrop of lived lives, these omnipresent clues are rarely fully decoded. The most monumental of sculptures has a habit of fading away to near invisibility if it is sufficiently familiar.
At times, though, such associations are activated and become urgent. So it has been in the case of the long-running affair of Edward Colston, who made his fortune in the 17th century from the enslavement of thousands of Africans.
Continue reading...Africa’s colonisation of the English language continues apace | Afua Hirsch
The British empire forced its colonies to abandon their own languages. Now they are making English their own
There is one expression I have grown up hearing from relatives of a certain age, but never been able to accept. It’s the description of Twi – the Akan language spoken by my family – as “the vernacular”, a term which implicitly compares it with the colonial language, English, and somehow finds it wanting. The word itself is a revealing symptom of the colonial project. Just as nations like the Yoruba, with a population of more than 40 million, were patronisingly described as “tribes”, when in fact they were substantial nations, African languages were downgraded to “the vernacular”. It’s a term more befitting of a regional dialect than a nation’s language, with its own history, politics and literature.
The attempt to discourage Africans from speaking our own languages not only failed, but has had the glorious result of backfiring, to the extent that now Britain’s own inhabitants are officially adopting African vocab. This month the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) added Nigeria’s first entries to already recognised gems like “howzit” from South Africa. Other Africans will recognise lots of the latest lingo to get the OED stamp – “chop”, to eat or to misappropriate funds; “next tomorrow”, the day after tomorrow; “sef”, a great Pidgin flourish for emphasis.
Continue reading...Kenya’s dispossessed seek redress for Britain’s ‘colonial injustices’
People whose families were brutally evicted to make way for tea plantations are taking their case for restitution to the UN
The red, fertile earth glistens in the Kenyan sun. Here in the lush green of the tea plantation uplands of Kericho County are some of the most lucrative lands in Africa.
Theaceae trees with their leathery, serrated leaves stretch in every direction. They provide tea to Europeans, making millions for the multinational companies that operate in the region. Yet for 85-year-old Peter Torongei, and thousands like him, there is very little hope. His tin shack sits firmly in the area called “Squatters Land”.
Continue reading...Bronze cockerel to be returned to Nigeria by Cambridge college
Benin bronze statue at Jesus College to be repatriated after 1897 theft by British forces
A bronze cockerel taken by British colonial forces and donated to Jesus College Cambridge is to be returned to Nigeria in an unprecedented step that adds momentum to the growing repatriations movement.
The Okukor, described by the college as a “royal ancestral heirloom”, will be one of the first Benin bronzes to be returned to Nigeria by a major British institution since the punitive expedition in 1897 when thousands of bronzes were stolen from Benin City by British forces.
Continue reading...Labour would return Chagos Islands, says Jeremy Corbyn
UK criticised for defying UN deadline to hand over control of Indian Ocean territory
Jeremy Corbyn has pledged to renounce British sovereignty of the remote Chagos Islands and respect a UN vote calling for the archipelago to be handed back to Mauritius.
In comments that appear to commit Labour to return the Indian Ocean islands, the party’s leader said on Friday he intended to “right one of the wrongs of history”.
Continue reading...British Museum is world’s largest receiver of stolen goods, says QC
Geoffrey Robertson says it should ‘wash its hands of blood and return Elgin’s loot’
The British Museum has been accused of exhibiting “pilfered cultural property”, by a leading human rights lawyer who is calling for European and US institutions to return treasures taken from “subjugated peoples” by “conquerors or colonial masters”.
Geoffrey Robertson QC said: “The trustees of the British Museum have become the world’s largest receivers of stolen property, and the great majority of their loot is not even on public display.”
Continue reading...End of Golden Age: Dutch museum bans term from exhibits
Debate over Netherlands’ colonial past resurfaces with switch to ‘17th century’ as alternative
One of the Netherlands’ most prestigious museums has fuelled fresh debate over the the country’s colonial past by deciding it will no longer use the term Golden Age to describe the 17th century when it was at its pinnacle as a military and trading power.
The Amsterdam Museum said that in an attempt to be “polyphonic and inclusive”, the common description of the century in which the Netherlands bestrode the world stage would be banned from its exhibits.
Continue reading...Kenyans who claim UK drove them from their land seek UN inquiry
More than 115,000 people allege they were forcibly removed by colonial-era army
Thousands of Kenyans who say they were driven from their homes and abused under British colonial rule and subsequently faced hardship and poverty have called on the UN to launch an investigation into their treatment.
British and Kenyan lawyers submitted a complaint to the UN special rapporteur on the promotion of justice, Fabián Salvioli, on behalf of more than 115,000 people originally from Kericho county, who claim they were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands by the British army.
Continue reading...Justin Welby prostrates himself in apology for British massacre at Amritsar
Archbishop says sorry ‘in the name of Christ’ over killing of 379 unarmed protesters in 1919
The archbishop of Canterbury has apologised “in the name of Christ” for the 1919 massacre at Amritsar in India, when hundreds of people were shot dead by British forces.
Prostrating himself at the memorial to the Jallianwala Bagh killings, Justin Welby said: “The souls of those who were killed or wounded, of the bereaved, cry out to us from these stones and warn us about power and the misuse of power.
Continue reading...White women were colonisers too. To move forward, we have to stop letting them off the hook | Ruby Hamad
We will never understand the impact of colonial oppression if we underestimate white women’s role in it, writes Ruby Hamad
On 21 September 2018, at the peak of the #MeToo movement that had supposedly shattered the silence around the sexual assault and harassment of women, 75 women, most of them white, convened in Washington DC to profess their support for the embattled supreme court justice nominee, Brett Kavanaugh.
A psychology professor, Christine Blasey Ford, had claimed Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her decades earlier when she was just 15. Ford’s testimony was buttressed by two other women with similar allegations, but this was not enough to stop Kavanaugh being confirmed.
Continue reading...Should museums return their colonial artefacts? | Tristram Hunt
Europe’s museums serve a nuanced purpose and shouldn’t automatically bow to calls to return artworks plundered by 19th-century colonisers, writes V&A director Tristram Hunt
“I am from a generation of the French people for whom the crimes of European colonialism are undeniable and make up part of our history,” announced Emmanuel Macron to a crowded lecture theatre at Ouagadougou University, in Burkina Faso, in November 2017. “I cannot accept that a large part of cultural heritage from several African countries is in France … In the next five years, I want the conditions to be created for the temporary or permanent restitution of African patrimony to Africa.” In case anyone missed the significance of the French president’s remarks, the Elysée Palace was swift to spell out the new policy: “African heritage can no longer be the prisoner of European museums.”
The following year brought another notable intervention, this time from supervillain Erik Killmonger in the Marvel blockbuster Black Panther. Surveying the African collection at the “Museum of Great Britain”, Killmonger corrects the exhibition’s patronising white curator about the provenance of an axe: “It was taken by British soldiers in Benin, but it’s from Wakanda. Don’t trip – I’m gonna take it off your hands for you.” When the woman replies that the items are not for sale, Killmonger says: “How do you think your ancestors got these? Do you think they paid a fair price? Or did they take it, like they took everything else?” As the poisoned curator collapses, Killmonger deaccessions the artefact. Black Panther took just 26 days to reach $1bn (£784,000) in worldwide box office sales and, in one compelling scene, highlighted all the current controversies over museum collections and colonial injustice.
Continue reading...British Museum ‘has head in sand’ over return of artefacts
Authors of major report accuse institution of hiding from issue of looted colonial-era objects
The authors of an influential report on colonial-era artefacts, which recommended a restitution programme to transfer hundreds of items from European institutions to Africa, have criticised the British Museum for acting like “an ostrich with its head in the sand”.
The Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr and the French art historian Bénédicte Savoy, who were asked to write the report by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, after he said the return of artefacts would be a priority during his tenure, said the British Museum was not addressing the issue.
Continue reading...Top 10 books about Sudan
Despite 30 years of repression that have hit writers unusually hard, Sudanese literature remains vigorous. Here is some of the best available in English
I was lucky to grow up in Khartoum in a house filled with books, at a time when Sudan’s public libraries flourished. One of the most startling discoveries I made as a child of about 13 was finding a couple of Tayeb Salih’s books on a shelf at home. Until that moment, I thought literature was something that took place elsewhere – in Dickens’s England or the Latin America of Borges, say. But here were stories that described the world right outside our front door. It was a moment of revelation and stirred the idea that it was possible to write.
Related: A Line in the River by Jamal Mahjoub review – Khartoum, city of memory
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