There Are Centuries Of History To Back It!

Interesting! Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan fighting the Western narrative on Chinese lending to Africa and the BRI:

"Maybe it’s time to set the record straight. China stepped up when people actually shied away from Africa. China built infrastructure that they cannot… https://t.co/3sOt8WQhy9

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) October 16, 2023

The director at IGAS was backing colonialism, trying to make fun of me. 

On her back, some of her colleagues gleefully insulted her, hoping to say something to me.

That is what you get for ass-licking.

Why is a Tanzanian chief's skull mentioned in the Versailles Treaty? || BBC

The Treaty of Versailles, signed exactly a century ago, reshaped Europe in the wake of World War One. So why, within its many hundreds of clauses, does the treaty refer to the decapitated head of an African anti-colonial hero?

By Damian ZaneBBC News

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The skull was used as a symbol to intimidate the Wahehe people, who the chief had led in a fierce rebellion against the German colonisers.

So successful was his campaign in the 1890s that a bounty was put on his head by the Germans. He is believed to have eventually taken his own life in 1898, rather than submit to the humiliation of being captured, as he sheltered in a cave that was encircled by German soldiers.

Two decades later, the fate of his skull was on the minds of the diplomats who spent months arguing over the settlement of World War One.

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Concealing The Truth Inflates The Illusion Of Superiority

The path to colonial reckoning is through archives, not museums

Returning colonial archives would allow Africans to begin constructing more accurate narratives of colonial experience.

by Patrick Gathara

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The colonial archive, the thousands of official records and documents that trace the history of subjugation, oppression and looting of the continent by the European powers is largely resident in Europe. And it is not a history that the Europeans have been eager to reveal, preferring to think of their time as overlords of the continent as something of a benevolent occupation. 

Yet, as Howard French noted in the New York Times two decades ago, "In the closing years of this century, though, historians, political scientists and other students of African affairs have begun a searching re-examination of the continent's recent past. Increasingly, they have concluded that many of its most persistent curses - from the plague of ethnic hatred widely known as tribalism to endemic official corruption - have powerful roots that are at least partly traceable to European subjugation and rule.”

Yet, a more comprehensive re-examination of this history, especially by the Africans who daily endure its worst legacies, is made difficult by the fact that the documents on which it is inscribed are retained by the architects of the oppression. France, for example, has refused to return Algerian colonial records. 

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In the case of the British Empire, the re-evaluation of the impact of its policies has been made unnecessarily difficult by the UK government's illegal, widespread and systematic destruction, theft and concealment of colonial-era documents in an effort to cover up its crimes. In the last decade or so, however, some of these hidden archives have come to light, showing the scale of the second attempt at "appropriation and alienation" of African history. A 2015 article in Vice by Katie Engelhart details how in 2011, after repeated denials, the UK government owned up to possessing 20,000 files from 37 colonies in "Migrated Archives" hidden in a secret facility at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire. Three years later, an audit discovered yet another 170,000 Colonial Office documents, some of them stamped "Top Secret". In fact, as late as the 1980s, the British were still destroying records on colonial Kenya.

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The Killing Times || Indigenous Australians (The Guardian)

Telling the truth about Australia's past will be painful – but it will be liberating

Rather than engendering guilt, the focus should be on healing historical wounds threatening the nation’s future

• The Killing Times: the massacres of Aboriginal people Australia must confront

School students left ignorant of Indigenous massacres, history teachers say

‘History is being squeezed out’ of a curriculum focused on Stem subjects, educators say

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Guns kill faster, but Concealing The Truth IS as much dangerous.


Framing the big picture would require to TELL the TRUTH, to teach the truth in schools, about occupation, colonialism, countless holocausts, directly and indirectly perpetuated by the Europeans, the natives against each other. Just for the sake of fairness. After that, there will be NO need for the illusion of superiority.

Alternative museum tours explore colonial loot, biased narratives || Aditya Iyer | Al Jazeera

Art historian Alice Procter’s ‘Uncomfortable Art Tours’ come amid renewed debate over Europe returning African art

by Aditya Iyer for Al Jazeera

Alice Procter, an art historian, says she launched the Uncomfortable Art Tours in 2013 to ‘ onfront the official narratives we’re told’ [Aditya Iyer/Al Jazeera]

London, England - "The South Sea Company did not trade in fish,“ says Alice Procter, as she shows visitors around Queen’s House, a maritime museum in Greenwich, southeast London. “They traded in something far more valuable to the English monarchy - slaves.”

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“Museums provide almost a Trojan horse type of space to confront the official narratives we’re told,” says Procter, who started the tours in 2013. 

“I started them out of a sense of frustration over the lack of self-awareness that white British people have over their pasts and history - and that lack of attention is part of the shadow of white supremacy and racism that’s hanging over our heads right now.”

Museums provide a biased view of the past, she claims.

“While museums continue to argue that they are neutral spaces, the fact is that they are not. There is always one side of the story that has been privileged over the other in these spaces, and we need to be more honest and open about that.”

This challenge to the official narrative comes at a time when Europe is facing a renewed debate over returning African art, much of which was acquired as colonial-era loot.

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A brave woman, In a world full of cowards …

It Is Time To Teach Colonial History in British Schools

Ruqaya Izzidien

If you grew up in Britain, like me, you probably would not be able to recall being taught anything substantial about British colonial history in school.

The British curriculum dedicates plenty of attention to the violence of others - in Nazi Germany or during the American Civil War - and goes into great detail on a few events in medieval and pre-Victorian English history, like the Plague, the Great Fire of London, and the reign of Henry VIII. But a British school would not teach you anything about the brutality of British colonialism.

We were told nothing of the concentration camps the British army ran during the Boer War, the Bengal famine of 1943 or the massacres of Kenyans in the 1950s.

In school, I heard nothing of the many crimes the British perpetrated against my Iraqi ancestors. No textbook ever mentioned that Winston Churchill, so deeply venerated as a hero and a brilliant statesman, openly endorsed a chemical attack on Iraqi civilians when they demanded independence from Britain.

The British curriculum did not teach me that Britain invited Iraqi leaders for negotiations, only to kidnap and imprison them, that it sent planes to bomb civilians when they refused to pay taxes or that it burned and destroyed villages and towns to quash revolts.

Since I left school thirteen years ago, the situation has hardly changed. When, in 2010, the British government decided to overhaul the curriculum, then-education secretary, Michael Gove, decided to invite an apologist of empire, historian Niall Ferguson, to help. As a result, British textbooks still whitewash the British Empire and fail to address the foundations of white supremacy on which colonialism was built and the lasting impact of imperial policies on colonised peoples.

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Yet, the dominant whitewashed narrative of British colonial history seems to be deeply ingrained in the British psyche. Today 49 percent of Britons still think that the British Empire was a force for good that improved the lives of colonised nations and only 15 percent think it left them worse off, according to a survey by market research company YouGov.

There also seems to be a persistent nostalgia for that colonial past. The truth is that in today’s Britain, colonialism sells.

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