Exploration And Colonialism Quotes

I just wanted all the wars to be over so that we could spend the money on starships and Mars colonies.

Wallace travelled independently and was challenged every step. He had no government or military support system. He had little cash — he earned enough to survive by sending natural history specimens to his agent in London for sale to collectors and museums. He had visceral moments of excitement when he discovered a beautiful new butterfly or adopted a baby orangutan he had just orphaned by shooting its mother. He lived simply, often in the rainforest on isolated islands, in a manner completely different to the expected behavior of other Western explorers and colonials.

Many questions were troubling the explorer, but at the sight of the prisoner he asked only: "Does he know his sentence?" "No," said the officer, eager to go on with his exposition, but the explorer interrupted him: "He doesn't know the sentence that has been passed on him?" "No," said the officer again, pausing a moment as if to let the explorer elaborate his question, and then said: "There would be no point in telling him. He'll learn it on his body.

I found it odd that the transport was less interested in Sanctuary Moon, which took place on a colony, than Worldhoppers, which was about the crew of a large exploration ship. You’d think it would be too much like work—I avoided serials about survey teams and mining installations—but maybe familiar things were easier for

People ask what will happen if Mars One fails. There will be Mars Two, Mars Three, there will be Gliese 581 One, Proxima Centauri b One etc. If a project opens the path for other projects, it means that it has already triumphed!

Stanley’s Congo expedition fired the starting gun for the Scramble for Africa. Before his trip, white outsiders had spent hundreds of years nibbling at Africa’s edges, claiming land around the coastline, but rarely venturing inland. Disease, hostile tribes and the lack of any clear commercial potential in Africa meant that hundreds of years after white explorers first circumnavigated its coastline, it was still referred to in mysterious terms as the Dark Continent, a source of slaves, ivory and other goods, but not a place white men thought worthy of colonisation. It was Leopold’s jostling for the Congo that forced other European powers to stake claims to Africa’s interior, and within two decades the entire continent had effectively been carved up by the white man. The modern history of Africa – decades of colonial exploitation and post-independence chaos – was begun by a Telegraph reporter battling down the Congo River.

Feminism involves so much more than gender equality. And it involves so much more than gender. Feminism must involve a consciousness of capitalism— I mean, the feminism that I relate to. And there are multiple feminisms, right? It has to involve a consciousness of capitalism, and racism, and colonialism, and postcolonialities, and ability, and more genders than we can even imagine, and more sexualities than we ever thought we could name. Feminism has helped us not only to recognize a range of connections among discourses, and institutions, and identities, and ideologies that we often tend to consider separately. But it has also helped us to develop epistemological and organizing strategies that take us beyond the categories “women” and “gender.” And, feminist methodologies impel us to explore connections that are not always apparent. And they drive us to inhabit contradictions and discover what is productive in these contradictions. Feminism insists on methods of thought and action that urge us to think about things together that appear to be separate, and to disaggregate things that appear to naturally belong together.

There needs to be an intersection of the set of people who wish to go, and the set of people who can afford to go...and that intersection of sets has to be enough to establish a self-sustaining civilisation. My rough guess is that for a half-million dollars, there are enough people that could afford to go and would want to go. But it’s not going to be a vacation jaunt. It’s going to be saving up all your money and selling all your stuff, like when people moved to the early American colonies...even at a million people you’re assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars. You would need to mine and refine all of these different materials, in a much more difficult environment than Earth. There would be no trees growing. There would be no oxygen or nitrogen that are just there. No oil.Excluding organic growth, if you could take 100 people at a time, you would need 10,000 trips to get to a million people. But you would also need a lot of cargo to support those people. In fact, your cargo to person ratio is going to be quite high. It would probably be 10 cargo trips for every human trip, so more like 100,000 trips. And we’re talking 100,000 trips of a giant spaceship...If we can establish a Mars colony, we can almost certainly colonise the whole Solar System, because we’ll have created a strong economic forcing function for the improvement of space travel. We’ll go to the moons of Jupiter, at least some of the outer ones for sure, and probably Titan on Saturn, and the asteroids. Once we have that forcing function, and an Earth-to-Mars economy, we’ll cover the whole Solar System. But the key is that we have to make the Mars thing work. If we’re going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation. That’s the next step.

They plunged into an enormous and eager conversation, first about books, then about shooting, in which the girl seemed to have an interest and about which she persuaded Flory to talk. She was quite thrilled when he described the murder of an elephant which he had perpetrated some years earlier.

It is a disagreeable thing when one’s close friend is not one’s social equal; but it is a thing native to the very air of India.

As a magistrate his methods were simple. Even for the vastest bribe he would never sell the decision of a case, because he knew that a magistrate who gives wrong judgments is caught sooner or later. His practice, a much safer one, was to take bribes from both sides and then decide the case on strictly legal grounds. This won him a useful reputation for impartiality.

The national bourgeoisie discovers its historical mission as intermediary. As we have seen, its vocation is not to transform the nation but prosaically serve as a conveyor belt for capitalism, forced to camouflage itself behind the mask of neocolonialism. The national bourgeoisie, with no misgivings and with great pride, revels in the role of agent in its dealings with the Western bourgeoisie. This lucrative role, this function as small-time racketeer, this narrow-mindedness and lack of ambition are symptomatic of the incapacity of the national bourgeoisie to fulfil its historic role as bourgeoisie. The dynamic, pioneering aspect, the inventive, discoverer-of-new-worlds aspect common to every national bourgeoisie is here lamentably absent. At the core of the national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries a hedonistic mentality prevails—because on a psychological level it identifies with the Western bourgeoisie from which it has slurped every lesson. It mimics the Western bourgeoisie in its negative and decadent aspects without having accomplished the initial phases of exploration and invention that are the assets of this Western bourgeoisie whatever the circumstances. In its early days the national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries identifies with the last stages of the Western bourgeoisie. Don’t believe it is taking short cuts. In fact it starts at the end. It is already senile, having experienced neither the exuberance nor the brazen determination of youth and adolescence.

God, if they’d only break out and rebel properly for once!’ he said to Ellis before starting. ‘But it’ll be a bloody washout as usual. Always the same story with these rebellions—peter out almost before they’ve begun. Would you believe it, I’ve never fired my gun at a fellow yet, not even a dacoit. Eleven years of it, not counting the War, and never killed a man. Depressing.’ ‘Oh,

Storm's coming! Huts and homes of the humble will thrive, while castles and palaces of thieves will crumble. Either we are explorers of equality and dignity, or we are crown worshipping animal.

The one that will put the first human colony on another planet is certainly the most important human on Earth. And you can judge the rest of mankind of his time by how they judge him along the way.

Just because there’s no one living on a planet does not mean it’s yours for the taking. Do you not see how dangerous that mindset is? Do you not think that treating the galaxy as if it is something to be endlessly used will always, always end in tragedy? You think you’ve broken the cycle. You haven’t. You’re in a less violent period of the exact same cycle, and you don’t see it. And the line of what you find to be justifiable cause is going to keep slipping and slipping until you end up right back where you started. You haven’t fixed anything. You put a stamp and a permit and a shiny coat of paint on an idea that has been fundamentally damaged from day one. You engaged in bloody theft and you called it progress, and no matter how much better you think you’ve made things, no matter how good your intentions are, that will always be the root of the GC. You cannot divorce any of what you do from that. Ever.

Under the rules of colonialism, everything goes to and comes from the mother country. In 1870, the colony of Turks and Caicos was asked to send a crest to England so that a flag for the colony could be designed. A Turks and Caicos designer drew a crest that included Salt Cay saltworks with salt rakers in the foreground and piles of salt. Back in England, it was the era of Arctic exploration, and, not knowing where the Turks and Caicos was, the English designer assumed the little white domes were igloos. And so he drew doors on each one. And this scene of salt piles with doors remained the official crest of the colony for almost 100 years, until replaced in 1968 by a crest featuring a flamingo.

In fact, researchers who exploit African Americans were the norm for much of our nation’s history, when black patients were commonly regarded as fit subjects for nonconsensual, nontherapeutic research. This book explores the many reasons that blacks are so vulnerable, but ultimately it is because American medical researchers remain a racially homogeneous group, and I show how the racial homogeneity of American medical researchers lies at the very heart of the problem.

I don't like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

Now, I assume you don’t want me to cart you back to Fjerda or the Shu Han?” It was clear Nina had finished the translation when Kuwei yelped, “No!” “Then your choices are Novyi Zem and the Southern Colonies, but the Kerch presence in the colonies is far lower. Also, the weather is better, if you’re partial to that kind of thing. You are a stolen painting, Kuwei. Too recognizable to sell on the open market, too valuable to leave lying around. You are worthless to me.” “I’m not translating that,” Nina snapped. “Then translate this: My sole concern is keeping you away from Jan Van Eck, and if you want me to start exploring more definite options, a bullet is a lot cheaper than putting you on a ship to the Southern Colonies.” Nina did translate, though haltingly. Kuwei responded in Shu. She hesitated. “He says you’re cruel.” “I’m pragmatic. If I were cruel, I’d give him a eulogy instead of a conversation. So, Kuwei, you’ll go to the Southern Colonies, and when the heat has died down, you can find your way to Ravka or Matthias’ grandmother’s house for all I care.” “Leave my grandmother out of this,” Matthias said.

One of the key principles of the Outer Space Treaty is that space is the common heritage of humanity and cannot be owned by anyone – government, nation, individual or corporation. Space is very colonial: we talk of the ‘conquest’ of space, the ‘high frontier’ or the ‘final frontier’, colonising other planets, and the innate urge of human beings to explore, often without thinking about it; it’s such a strong master narrative. Instead of considering the treaty to be outdated, we might equally think of it as a radical statement of equality and justice – and one we need more than ever.

In times of colonial expansion, when support for the slave trade was required, the historian fed readers tales of explorers and conquerors. When soldiers were needed, ready to die for king and country, the historian gave them heroes and warriors. When society favored male dominance and female subservience, the historian provided male oriented history What about writing history now, at a time when so many are striving for greater equality? Can looking backward impact how we look forward? Finding empowered women with agency from the medieval period is my way of shifting gear, providing new narratives for readers today.

This story takes place on stolen land. While Sorrowland is set in a United States with a speculative and amorphous shape, the geography and settings explored are based on areas traditionally stewarded by the Tonkawa, Caddo Nation, and Lipan Apache in what are colonially known as Central and East Texas, as well as on lands historically, inhabited by various Plains nations with shifting territories, including the Apsáalooke/Crow, Oceti Sakowin/Sioux, and Arapaho, in what settlers have designated Wyoming and Montana. No story of the so-called United States is complete without an understanding of its foundation on genocide and dislocation, nor without acknowledgment of the Indigenous people still here fighting the ongoing occupation.

Point Partageuse got its name from French explorers who mapped the cape that jutted from the south-western corner of the Australian continent well before the British dash to colonize the west began in 1826. Since then, settlers had trickled north from Albany and south from the Swan River Colony, laying claim to the virgin forests in the hundreds of miles between. Cathedral-high trees were felled with handsaws to create grazing pasture; scrawny roads were hewn inch by stubborn inch by pale-skinned fellows with teams of shire horses, as this land, which had never before been scarred by man, was excoriated and burned, mapped and measured and meted out to those willing to try their luck in a hemisphere which might bring them desperation, death, or fortune beyond their dreams.

Beginning in the mid to late 1980s, poverty, underdevelopment, economic dependence, ethnic and class conflict, lack of political practices prioritizing equal citizenship rights, and fragile political and economic institutions all came to be structural handicaps from the legacy of European colonialism. Colonialism was not the source of all of Africa’s problems, but it was a significant contributor. What

Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines—flying machines, the peasants said—from the great days of Canberra’s original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise’s local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems. So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge. “We should rewrite it all,” said Pham. “It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation. “It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.” Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here.” She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. “We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don’t have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I’ve been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need.” “Almost precisely.

As king of a small country with no public interest in colonies, he recognized that a colonial push of his own would require a strong humanitarian veneer. Curbing the slave trade, moral uplift, and the advancement of science were the aims he would talk about, not profits. In 1876, he began planning a step to establish his image as a philanthropist and advance his African ambitions: he would host a conference of explorers and geographers.

Forbes did, in fact, break new ground for women...She was an irrepressible and independent traveler who took risky and difficult trips, braved the hostility of the colonial officials and bureaucrats of the British empire, and invaded the male sphere of exploration, using charm, chutzpah--and her extensive network of establishment connections--to get where she wanted to go. (From the Sahara to Samarkand: Selected Travel Writings of Rosita Forbes, 1919-1937)

When microbes arrived in the Western Hemisphere, he argued, they must have swept from the coastlines first visited by Europeans to inland areas populated by Indians who had never seen a white person. Colonial writers knew that disease tilled the virgin soil of the Americas countless times in the sixteenth century. But what they did not, could not, know is that the epidemics shot out like ghastly arrows from the limited areas they saw to every corner of the hemisphere, wreaking destruction in places that never appeared in the European historical record. The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas therefore would have encountered places that were already depopulated.

ONE OF THE peculiarities of the white race’s presence in America is how little intention has been applied to it. As a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be. The continent is said to have been discovered by an Italian who was on his way to India. The earliest explorers were looking for gold, which was, after an early streak of luck in Mexico, always somewhere farther on. Conquests and foundings were incidental to this search—which did not, and could not, end until the continent was finally laid open in an orgy of goldseeking in the middle of the 19th century. Once the unknown of geography was mapped, the industrial marketplace became the new frontier, and we continued, with largely the same motives and with increasing haste and anxiety, to displace ourselves—no longer with unity of direction, like a migrant flock, but like the refugees from a broken ant hill. In our own time we have invaded foreign lands and the moon with the high-toned patriotism of the conquistadors, and with the same mixture of fantasy and avarice.

Feminism involves so much more than gender equality. And it involves so much more than gender. Feminism must involve a consciousness of capitalism—I mean, the feminism that I relate to. And there are multiple feminisms, right? It has to involve a consciousness of capitalism, and racism, and colonialism, and postcolonialities, and ability, and more genders than we can even imagine, and more sex-ualities than we ever thought we could name. Feminism has helped us not only to recognize a range of connections among discourses, and institutions, and identities, and ideologies that we often tend to consider separately. But it has also helped us to develop epistemological and organizing strategies that take us beyond the categories “women” and “gender.” And, feminist methodologies impel us to explore connections that are not always apparent. And they drive us to inhabit contradictions and discover what is productive in these contradictions. Feminism insists on methods of thought and action that urge us to think about things together that appear to be separate, and to disaggregate things that appear to naturally belong together.

Feminism involves so much more than gender equality. And it involves so much more than gender. Feminism must involve a consciousness of capitalism - I mean, the feminism that I relate to. And there are multiple feminisms, right? It has to involve a consciousness of capitalism, and racism, and colonialism, and postcolonialities, and ability, and more genders than we can even imagine, and more sexualities than we ever thought we could name. Feminism has helped us not only to recognize a range of connections among discourses, and institutions, and identities, and ideologies that we often tend to consider separately. But it has also helped us to develop epistemological and organizing strategies that take us beyond the categories 'women' and 'gender.' And, feminist methodologies impel us to explore connections that are not always apparent. And they drive us to inhabit contradictions and discover what is productive in these contradictions. Feminism insists on methods of thought and action that urge us to think about things together that appear to be separate, and to disaggregate things that appear to naturally belong together.

We keep sending colonies up into space,” Akilah says, “and we don’t even know what’s at the bottom of the sea.” “Yeah, we do,” I counter. “Fish and stuff.” Akilah laughs. “We’ve barely explored the sea. There are places where the water is so deep that it has never seen light.” She sighs. “I would like to go to those places. I would like to sink down and down and down and see what’s hidden at the bottom.” The sea is a dangerous place because it makes you believe in forever. I stare back at the shoreline, where heavy boulders clutter the shore, a remembrance of the attacks during the Secessionary War. For all the hundreds of thousands of people killed in the war, more are dead and gone beneath the waves of the sea. I tread water, turning slowly, so the island’s behind me and all I can see is the blue-green waters. The sea goes on forever and ever. We are tiny, almost invisible specks. It could swallow us up. We are less than the bright stars of the night sky, compared to the vastness of the sea. And it is this place, as one tiny, barely visible speck bobbing in the water, where Akilah feels safe. Maybe being alone in the sea, with its unexplored depths, its clawing-finger waves, really is safer compared to the land, where there are people and malice and death.

No Language not only imagines a sexual politics as West Indian as the Caribbean Sea but also charts complex relationships between eroticism, colonialism, militarism, resistance, revolution, poverty, despair, fullness, and hope that explore the pliability necessary to imagine Caribbean same-sex loving politics differently, postcolonially. Myriam Chancy, in the first study of Brand’s poetry, writes her artistic vision as a rescripting of traditional poetics into poelitics: “A fusion of politics and poetry that recalls Lorde, who once wrote of the transformative power of poetry as ‘a revelatory distillation of experience’ and as an act of fusion between ‘true knowledge’ and ‘lasting action.’ ”8 Brand vocalizes quite lucidly the threat that this infusion of politics into poetics poses to both revolutionary and neocolonial Caribbean thinkers: “To dream about a Black woman, even an old Black woman, is dangerous even in a Black dream, an old dream, a Black woman’s dream, even in a dream where you are the dreamer,” she writes of reactions to her black lesbian feminist revolutionary artistic work by Marxists and conservatives alike. “Even in a Black dream, where I, too, am a dreamer, a lesbian is suspect; a woman is suspect even to other women, especially if she dreams of women.

In 1498, Vasco da Gama the Portuguese navigator explored this eastern coast of Africa flanking the Indian Ocean. This led him to open a trade route to Asia and occupy Mozambique to the Portuguese colony. In 1840, it came under the control of the Sultan of Zanzibar and became a British protectorate in 1895, with Mombasa as its capital. Nairobi, lying 300 miles to the northwest of Mombasa is the largest city in Kenya. It became the capital in 1907 and is the fastest growing urban area in the Republic having become independent of the United Kingdom on December 12, 1963 and declared a republic the following year on December 12, 1964. Kenya is divided by the 38th meridian of longitude into two very different halves. The eastern half of Kenya slopes towards the coral-backed seashore of the Indian Ocean while the western side rises through a series of hills to the African Shear Zone or Central Rift. West of the Rift, the lowest part of a westward-sloping plateau contains Lake Victoria. This, the largest lake in Africa, receives most of its water from rain, the Kagera River and countless small streams. Its only outlet is the White Nile River which is part of the longest river on Earth. Combined, the Blue Nile and the White Nile, stretches 4,160 miles before emptying into the Mediterranean Sea.

Many real-world Northwestern endonyms have European origins, such as “Portland,” “Victoria,” “Bellingham,” and “Richland.” To address this phenomenon while also contributing a sense of the fantastic, I chose to utilize a forgotten nineteenth century European artificial language as a source. Volapük is clumsy and awkward, but shares a relationship with English vocabulary (upon which it is based) that I was able to exploit. In my fictional universe, that relationship is swapped, and English (or rather, “Vendelabodish”) words derive from Volapük (“Valütapük”). This turns Volapük into an ancient Latin-like speech, offering texture to a fictional history of the colonizers of my fictional planets. Does one have to understand ancient Rome and medieval Europe and America’s Thirteen Colonies to understand the modern Pacific Northwest? Nah. But exploring the character and motivations of a migrating, imperial culture certainly sets the stage for explaining a modernist backlash against the atrocities that inevitably come with colonization.             The vocabulary of Volapük has also given flavor that is appropriate, I feel, to the quasi-North American setting. While high fantasy worlds seem to be built with pillars of European fairy tales, the universe of Geoduck Street is intentionally built with logs of North American tall tales. Tolkien could wax poetic about the aesthetic beauty of his Elvish words all he wanted, since aesthetic beauty fits the mold of fairies and shimmering palaces, but Geoduck Street needed a “whopper-spinning” approach to artificial language that would make a flapjack-eating Paul Bunyan proud. A prominent case in point: in this fictional universe, the word “yagalöp” forms the etymological root of “jackalope.” “Yag,” in the original nineteenth century iteration of Volapük, means “hunting,” while “löp” means “summit.” Combining them together makes them “the summit of hunting.” How could a jackalope not be a point of pride among hunting trophies?

At this point, another trope makes its appearance. It can be called the invention of anachronistic space, and it reached full authority as an administrative and regulatory technology in the late Victorian era. Within this trope, the agency of women, the colonized and the industrial working class are disavowed and projected onto anachronistic space: prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity. According to the colonial version of this trope, imperial progress across the space of empire is figured as a journey backward in time to an anachronistic moment of prehistory. By extension, the return journey to Europe is seen as rehearsing the evolutionary logic of historical progress, forward and upward to the apogee of the Enlightenment in the European metropolis. Geographical difference across space is figured as a historical difference across time. The ideologue J.-M. Degerando captured this notion concisely: “The philosophical traveller, sailing to the ends of the earth, is in fact travelling in time; he is exploring the past.” 46 The stubborn and threatening heterogeneity of the colonies was contained and disciplined not as socially or geographically different from Europe and thus equally valid, but as temporally different and thus as irrevocably superannuated by history. Hegel, for example, perhaps the most influential philosophical proponent of this notion, figured Africa as inhabiting not simply a different geographical space but a different temporal zone, surviving anachronistically within the time of history. Africa, announces Hegel, “is no Historical part of the world … it has no movement or development to exhibit.” Africa came to be seen as the colonial paradigm of anachronistic space, a land perpetually out of time in modernity, marooned and historically abandoned. Africa was a fetish-land, inhabited by cannibals, dervishes and witch doctors, abandoned in prehistory at the precise moment before the Weltgeist (as the cunning agent of Reason) manifested itself in history.

The nineteenth-century German explorer Alexander von Humboldt noted the parallel between the limpieza restrictions in Spain and the racial discrimination he found in the Spanish colonies in the New World: “In Spain it is a kind of title of nobility not to descend from Jews or Moors. In America, the skin, more or less white, is what dictates the class that an individual occupies in society. A white, even if he rides barefoot on horseback, considers himself a member of the nobility of the country.”15

HISTORY OF NIGERIA Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country and the world’s eighth largest oil producer, but its success has been undermined in recent decades by ethnic and religious conflict, political instability, rampant official corruption, and an ailing economy. Toyin Falola, a leading historian intimately acquainted with the region, and Matthew Heaton, who has worked extensively on African science and culture, combine their expertise to explain the context to Nigeria’s recent troubles, through an exploration of its pre-colonial and colonial past and its journey from independence to statehood. By examining key themes such as colonialism, religion, slavery, nationalism, and the economy, the authors show how Nigeria’s history has been swayed by the vicissitudes of the world around it, and how Nigerians have adapted to meet these challenges. This book offers a unique portrayal of a resilient people living in a country with immense, but unrealized, potential. TOYIN FALOLA is the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor in History at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include The Power of African Cultures (2003), Economic Reforms and Modernization in Nigeria, 1945–1965 (2004), and A Mouth Sweeter than Salt: An African Memoir (2004). MATTHEW M. HEATON is a Patrice Lumumba Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He has co-edited multiple volumes on health and illness in Africa with Toyin Falola, including HIV/AIDS, Illness and African Well-Being (2007) and Health Knowledge and Belief Systems in Africa (2007). A HISTORY OF NIGERIA

There is more to America’s past than appears on the surface. A strange unrest is apparent among many of the younger historians and archaeologists of the colleges and universities, a sense that somehow a very large slice of America’s past has mysteriously vanished from our public records. For how else can we explain the ever-swelling tally of puzzling ancient inscriptions now being reported from nearly all parts of the United States, Canada, and Latin America?...These inscriptions are written in various European and Mediterranean languages in alphabets that date from 2,500 years ago, and they speak not only of visits by ancient ships, but also of permanent colonies of Celts, Basques, Libyans, and even Egyptians – Barry Fell (America BC) Lewis Spence, one of the latest writers on the subject, concludes that the Toltec and Maya civilizations never originated on American soil but appeared there full blown, with a well-defined art and system of hieroglyphic writing which possesses affinities with the Egyptian – Comyns Beaumont (The Riddle of Prehistoric Britain) There seems little doubt but that the Irish had intercourse with America far earlier than any definite records, nor would it be surprising in view of the comparative proximity of the two – ibid As to so-called Druidical monuments, no argument can be drawn thence, as to the primary seat of this mysticism, since they are to be seen nearly all over the world – James Bonwick (Irish Druids and Old Irish Religions, 1894)

There had been, throughout history, pauses in humanity’s natural urge to expand and explore.

In a world without religious freedom, civil rights, or free speech—the colonial world of the 1630s that was the seed of the modern United States—Anne Hutchinson was an American visionary, pioneer, and explorer who epitomized the religious freedom and tolerance that are essential to the nation’s character.

In the 19th century, many European countries sought colonies. Leopold II long cherished the ambition to give a colony to Belgium. He came into contact with British explorer Stanley, who found no interest in Central Africa in London. Later, the British would regret it. They discredited the Congo Free State to get their hands on Katanga and its mining resources. In 1908 London tried to sabotage Belgium’s takeover of the Congo Free State by formulating conditions. But other countries did not follow that line. In 1911, the British signed a secret agreement with Germany on a reallocation of Africa; the Germans would not follow through. In 1937 British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain offered Hitler ‘half of the Belgian Congo’ in exchange for peace in Europe; but the Fuhrer refused.

Africans began life in the Americas as subjects profoundly shaped by their Atlantic experience, and the communities they created in the Americas were organized around solutions to the specific problems they faced. The cultures they produced do not reflect the simple transfer and continuation of Africa in the Americas but rather reflect the elaboration of specific cultural content and its transformation to meet the particular needs of slave life in the Atlantic system: their need to reassert some kind of healthy relationship to ancestors; to manage death; to produce social networks, communities, and relations of kinship; to address the imbalance of power between black and white; to stake a claim to their bodies to counter the plantation economy’s claim to ownership. In this sense, the cultural practices of diasporic Africa could have meaning only outside Africa. Shared Atlantic experience and memory served as a touchstone for new cultural practices that emerged in the New World diaspora. Only through the capacity and willingness to invent and experiment—to grow and change the cultural tools carried in memory and create new ones to meet the demands of this new world—could Africans hope to remain recognizable to themselves as human beings in a system that held so much of their humanity in callous and calculated disregard. African immigrants retained that foothold in ways determined by the varied circumstances of their slavery: the immigrant slave might adapt a remembered ritual practice to new applications in American slavery or explore and perhaps ultimately adopt an entirely novel practice. The means were extraordinarily diverse because of the great variety of settings and conditions in which the colonial economies of the Americas enslaved human beings. The continuity Africans needed was not the static, ossifying connection of conformity of practice—doing things in the present as they had been done in the past, even when the context of past cultural forms no longer corresponded to the needs and circumstances of the present. Rather, the connection Africans needed was a narrative continuity between past and present—an epistemological means of connecting the dots between there and here, then and now, to craft a coherent story out of incoherent experience.

To open to civilization the only part of the globe not yet explored, to penetrate the shadows that envelope its entire population; This is, I make bold to say a crusade worthy of this century of progress, and i am happy to note that public opinion is favorable to its undertaking.

I was inspired by my travels as a westerner through a little understood area of Japan: Okinawa. One small island of the former Ryukyu Kingdom, it is currently host to 33 US military bases. I wanted to explore a possible future based on past and present colonial crimes there and the ecological catastrophe that threatens all tropical islands

Every one of these ideas though must be considered in the cultural context and time in which it was authored. All are by European men being exposed to the peoples of the world as a result of expanded trade routes, colonialization, and empire building, and in many cases the conquering and enslavement of the people they encountered. The invention of race occurs in an era of exploration, exploitation, and plunder, an era when the othering of people from colonies extended to actual human zoos.

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the English had been among the pioneers of Atlantic exploration, but during the long reign of Henry VIII (Queen Elizabeth’s father) merchants and mariners had turned away from distant horizons and focused instead on opportunities nearer to home, trading with Europe and countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea. Other

We always talk of them as though they’d sprung up from the ground like mushrooms, with all their faults ready-made. But when all’s said and done, we’re responsible for their existence.

As a subject of behavioral study, nest architecture offers an appealing feature that practically no other behavior offer; namely, the nest is a perfect record of the collective digging effort of a colony, and once cast, is ready to study. By studying a series of casts of increasing size it is possible to describe the nest's growth and ontogeny, infer its species-typical characteristics, and bracket the range of variation. By doing this under different environments and soil types, possibly with transplanted colonies, it is possible to tease out the variation that the environment imposes on the architecture. The current study is only a small, initial step toward creating a field of nest architecture studies, whose ultimate goal is an understanding of how the nest emerges from self-organizing behavior, what function it serves, how it varies within and between species, and how it evolves. In addition, these casts reveal something previously unseen. The study of nest architecture is thus a true exploration of a hidden world that hold unsuspected beauty, patter, and complexity.

A hundred years later, princes and bankers were willing to extend far more credit to Columbus’ successors, and they had more capital at their disposal, thanks to the treasures reaped from America. Equally important, princes and bankers had far more trust in the potential of exploration, and were more willing to part with their money. This was the magic circle of imperial capitalism: credit financed new discoveries; discoveries led to colonies; colonies provided profits; profits built trust; and trust translated into more credit. Nurhaci and Nader Shah ran out of fuel after a few thousand kilometres. Capitalist entrepreneurs only increased their financial momentum from conquest to conquest.

The nineteenth century brought no improvement in the ethics of capitalism. The Industrial Revolution that swept through Europe enriched the bankers and capital-owners, but condemned millions of workers to a life of abject poverty. In the European colonies things were even worse. In 1876, King Leopold II of Belgium set up a nongovernmental humanitarian organisation with the declared aim of exploring Central Africa and fighting the slave trade along the Congo River. It was also charged with improving conditions for the inhabitants of the region by building roads, schools and hospitals. In 1885 the European powers agreed to give this organisation control of 2.3 million square kilometres in the Congo basin. This territory, seventy-five times the size of Belgium, was henceforth known as the Congo Free State. Nobody asked the opinion of the territory’s 20–30 million inhabitants. Within a short time the humanitarian organisation became a business enterprise whose real aim was growth and profit. The schools and hospitals were forgotten, and the Congo basin was instead filled with mines and plantations, run by mostly Belgian officials who ruthlessly exploited the local population. The rubber industry was particularly notorious. Rubber was fast becoming an industrial staple, and rubber export was the Congo’s most important source of income. The African villagers who collected the rubber were required to provide higher and higher quotas. Those who failed to deliver their quota were punished brutally for their ‘laziness’. Their arms were chopped off and occasionally entire villages were massacred. According to the most moderate estimates, between 1885 and 1908 the pursuit of growth and profits cost the lives of 6 million individuals (at least 20 per cent of the Congo’s population). Some estimates reach up to 10 million deaths.4

We can’t help doing so. In fact, before we’ve finished we’ll have wrecked the whole Burmese national culture. But we’re not civilizing them, we’re only rubbing our dirt on to them.

Although it would be about the leper colony of Bababaghi, the film would also explore the fact that great trouble and suffering is caused when we reject certain parts of ourselves and bury our unwelcome feelings, rather than facing up to our problems and searching for a solution. The story of a community being rejected due to a lack of access to proper medical help would draw wider attention to how societies are willing to condemn anything that is different to themselves, rather than to confront their fears of the other.

How vulgarly, how cruelly she had behaved to him! It is dreadful when people will not even have the decency to quarrel.

Beauty’s all a matter of taste.

An expression of agony came into his face, and he seized the dead man by the shoulders and shook him as though mere violence could bring him to life.

Godbeer notes in his book that the way we currently approach both friendship and sexual orientation, although we assume it is just rooted in nature, would be confusing to the patriots or anyone living in the colonial period: The modern assumption that most people are attracted—sexually and romantically—to either women or men would have surprised early Americans.… Male friends often referred to the pleasure that they took in touching and holding one another; they delighted in the proximity of each other’s bodies … Sexualized love was just one in a rich repertoire of possibilities open to premodern men as they explored their feelings for male friends.

The history of Patagonia is a classic colonial enterprise of exploration, invasion, evangelization and ethnic cleansing, recast by the victors as a tale of heroes overcoming obstacles. This narrative has sought to supplant anything that went before, and has treated past peoples as lesser mortals and their culture as so much scrubland to be burned away.

The Age of Exploration and Colonialism (1400s–1700s)

Looked around at the wind-blasted peaks and the swirls of mist moving past them. It was hard to take my eyes away. I had been up on some of them, and I would be up there again. There was something different to see each time, and something different from each one. All those streamlets to explore and all those tracks to follow through the glare of the high basins and over the saddles. Where did they lead? What was beyond? What stories were written in the snow? I watched an eagle turn slowly and fall away, quick-sliding across the dark stands of spruce that marched in uneven ranks up the slopes. His piercing cry came back on the wind. I thought of the man at his desk staring down from a city window at the ant colony streets below, the man toiling beside the thudding and rumbling of machinery, the man commuting to his job the same way at the same time each morning, staring at but not seeing the poles and the wires and the dirty buildings flashing past. Perhaps each man had his moment during the day when his vision came, a vision not unlike the one before me.

How come Hitler is a bigger villain than the British monarchy, when Hitler invaded only 11 countries, while the British empire invaded 90 percent of the globe, that is, over 170 countries, and caused multiple times the massacre than the Nazis did! And while modern Germans are well aware of the nation's horrific past, and try their best to right the wrongs, like civilized, conscientious humans ought to, in barbarian britain however, over half the population still stand proudly behind the monarchy, let alone recognize the animal filth it represents, which till this day is unparalleled by any other animal regime. Now to the reason why Hitler is officially a villain, but not the British monarchy. Hitler invaded white countries, while the British empire invaded mostly colored countries - and since colored life is cheap, but white life is priceless, Hitler is branded a villain, while the Brits are designated "explorers" and "bringers of civilization", a tradition which has been proudly inherited by the modern day British Empire - the United States of America.

Divide and rule is the law of animals, Unite and integrate is law of humanity.

The Gaza Sonnet, 1264 (All Free or None Free) Al-Shams to Alpha Centauri, All occupied lands will be free. Till there is smile on every face, All happiness is blasphemy. Happiness is not an imperial merch, Freedom is no colonizer's heirloom. Joy is no bigot's ancestral bequest, Earth is not a zionist hand-me-down. Divide and rule is the law of animals, Unite and integrate is law of humanity. One human life is worth more, than all the gas reserves underneath. Gaza is not a place, Gaza is a wake up call, to the peace-crying humanity. Awake, Arise, O Citizens of Earth - Till all of us are free, none of us are free!

Happiness is not an imperial merch, Freedom is no colonizer's heirloom. Joy is no bigot's ancestral bequest, Earth is not a zionist hand-me-down.

All darknesses in history were caused by people who thought they were bringing light.

In 1641, Massachusetts became the first colony to recognize slavery as a legal institution. By the mid-1600s, slavery was evolving into a race-based institution: the enslaved were identified by the color of their skin.

Phillis Wheatley, a young slave girl, published a collection of poems titled 'Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral' in 1773, when she was around twenty years old, becoming the first enslaved African in America to publish a book of poetry.

Religion has always been an important staple in African American culture. During slavery, Africans were forbidden from practicing their own spiritual beliefs brought with them from Africa. It was against the law, in most of the colonies, for blacks to gather in groups larger than three. As a result, they were not allowed to form their own churches. The enslaved had to worship with their masters at their churches or secretly, in out-of-the-way meeting places. Religion was one of the ways slaveholders kept the enslaved in bondage. Slaveholders converted thousands of enslaved Africans to Christianity, with the belief that they were saving people they considered "inferior," and they often cited the Bible to validate this idea. They also used the fear of God to enforce a slave's obedience.

During the American Revolution, the British offered emancipation to any enslaved person who fought on their side. This military tactic infuriated the Patriots and caused pandemonium on the southern plantations as thousands of slaves escaped and joined the British Army or sought refuge behind enemy lines.

President Pitzer, Mr. Vice President, Governor, Congressman Thomas, Senator Wiley, and Congressman Miller, Mr. Webb. Mr. Bell, scientists, distinguished guests, and ladies and gentlemen: I appreciate your president having made me an honorary visiting professor, and I will assure you that my first lecture will be very brief. I am delighted to be here and I'm particularly delighted to be here on this occasion. We meet at a college noted for knowledge, in a city noted for progress, in a State noted for strength, and we stand in need of all three, for we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds. Despite the striking fact that most of the scientists that the world has ever known are alive and working today, despite the fact that this Nation's own scientific manpower is doubling every 12 years in a rate of growth more than three times that of our population as a whole, despite that, the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far out-strip our collective comprehension. No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man's recorded history in a time span of but a half century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only 5 years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than 2 years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than 2 months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight. This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward. So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward-and so will space. William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage. If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space. Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it - we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace...

Decolonized History Lesson (Sonnet 1546) Early Arabs and Indians invented astronomy and algebra, Early white people invented genocide and massacre. Indigenous Latinos invented chocolate, Early Chinese invented printing. Early Caucasians invented cockiness, calling invasion as civilization-bringing. Modern Arabs build cities in the desert, Modern whites still burn down cities. Modern Indians democratize space exploration, Modern whites still manufacture disparities. Modern whites coddle hate and prejudice, and use free speech as justification. If any humane white ever questions hate, they're branded, woke traitor to the nation. Till this day, white people manufacture 99% of the world's human rights violations. If you right the wrong, it's cussed as wokeness, To support white terrorism is patriotism.

Americans have always explored the mysteries of conversing with the departed. In Colonial Pennsylvania while prominent Quakers tried to convince members of their own denomination to give up divination by geomancy, palmistry, and astrology, they were themselves experimenting with not just communication with the dead but also, like their brethren back home in England, inspired by the New Testament, a few tried to raise the dead. Even less experimental Quakers owed much to the great German mystic Jakob Böhme, the Kabbalah, and Rosicrucian and alchemical undercurrents. Spiritual healing was a constant theme.

neither policymakers nor the oil companies perceived Israel as a threat to US oil interests, given Saudi complaisance over Palestine (at the height of the 1948 war, as Israeli troops overran most of the country and expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Marshall found cause to thank King Ibn Sa‘ud for his “conciliatory manner” regarding Palestine).50 Thereafter, Saudi Arabia never rocked the boat where the close American-Israeli relationship was concerned. Indeed, it was seen by the Saudi royal family as completely compatible with the intimate American-Saudi connection that went back to the first oil exploration and exploitation deal of 1933.

Al-Shams to Alpha Centauri, All occupied lands will be free. Till there is smile on every face, All happiness is blasphemy.

Sasha Costanza-Chock’s book Design Justice outlines the principles and explores how “universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people—specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism).”12 Design can be a tool for collective liberation. The disability justice movement has taken leadership on this issue.13 The #disabilityjustice hashtag is one place to start learning more; other hashtags for learning about disability include #deaftwitter, #blindtwitter, #a11y, #blindtiktok, #disabilityawareness, and #instainclusion.

I think you should be punished for tormenting me for so long.” --- “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Art is full of agony and beauty. The pen itself a sword of pleasure and pain, isn’t it, my poet?” --- “I’ve been waiting for you.” His voice sizzled with hunger. How could I respond? I’ve been thinking about you non-stop like a sex-crazed harlot since I left? “I’m here.” --- “Remind me who you are,” he said in a gentler tone, almost a please. “How we know each other.” “Okay,” she began. “I’m Savannah Evans, a grad student and teaching assistant who teaches English at a college in Cambridge. I applied to the colony to work on my poetry and arrived six weeks ago. “We’ve spoken many times. You’ve praised my work, which I find a great honor as I’m a fan of your art.” --- “A cross between two species. Doomed with the thirst of the undead for human blood, yet tormented by the gargoyle drive to protect them.” --- She ceased to breathe. When he leaned forward and his lips fluttered against hers, her footing became unsteady and she stumbled. He placed a hand on her lower back to steady her and pulled her close. Her breasts met his hard torso and she became aware at how frantically her heart beat. She wrapped her arms around his neck and lost herself in the kiss as their lips met. They explored each other with a sort of fascination, mouth and tongues claiming each other in their hunger. Delicately at first, as if not sure this was real or just a fantasy, and then strong and unyielding. Demanding this moment to never end. --- “I bought new lingerie today I wanted to show you, but I didn’t get a chance with all that happened.” “You’ll have to return tomorrow night then…. Maybe we’ll order an entire catalog.” His smile and the glint of mischievousness in his eyes reflected lascivious thoughts. “You can model all the outfits you’d like for me.” ---

Early twentieth-century English writers Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton—and, later, a young Marshall McLuhan—saw in distributism a definitive answer to the failures of both capitalism and state socialism.6, 7, 8 They looked to that same brief moment in the late Middle Ages we’ve been exploring, when the market was in ascendance and former peasants were making and trading things, as the best example of the ideal economic system. Wealth was relatively widely dispersed, and people had a great deal of control over their livelihoods. They had access to the commons, to a low-cost marketplace, and to their own currencies and credit systems. Craftspeople belonged to trade guilds that both bounded their investment of labor and allowed for the advancement of skills to successive generations. The former peasants of this period became so collectively wealthy that they used their surplus profits to build cathedrals and municipal projects as investments in the future. The centralization of power by the aristocracy and the great Renaissance that followed, according to all three popes, were less a pinnacle of human achievement than an undeserved celebration of dehumanizing technologies, economic injustice, colonial slavery, and an increasingly mechanized approach to life. In distributism, they saw a way to bring back what had been forcibly left behind by the industrial age and the rise of Protestant values that were, not coincidentally, much more directed toward personal achievement, individual wealth, and progress. But

While King Leopold II of Belgium established his notoriously brutal colonial regime late in the nineteenth century in the Congo, a system to extract rubber evolved in the farthest reaches of the Upper Amazon that was also based on terror, mass abduction, and forced labor. Exploration

Like strangler figs choking a banyan, not an explorer, no imperialist, not one of us, in taking what we pleased—in colonizing as the saying is—has been a synonym for mercy.

lies Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of Chile. There, in 1830, Captain Robert Fitzroy docked an exploration vessel, and as part of hostile negotiations seized three Fuegians, boys named el’leparu and o’run-del’lico, and a girl named yok’cushly. They were given absurd English names—York Minster, Jemmy Button, Fuegia Basket—as part of a bizarre colonial experiment to see if these savages could be “civilized.” Fitzroy took them to England (a fourth named Boat Memory was also taken, but died of smallpox after they arrived; his real, Fuegian name is lost).

Ultimately, the imperative to be practical in our field hinges on a deep (if somewhat paradoxical) individualism. In spite of overtones of inclusivity, it treats critical work as self-contained, suggesting that truly ethical work in the library world requires each of us to come up with complete sets of questions and complete sets of answers, to individually balance what is understood to be theory with what is understood to be practice, to ensure that our language is always going to be intelligible to everyone. We in the library world ought to understand that this is neither possible nor desirable, as so much of what we do points to the fact that all work is both necessarily incomplete and necessarily interdependent--the citation, the bibliography and its community of complicated absences, the shelf with more than one item, the marginalia and corporeal micro-residues (visible and invisible) left on magazines pulled through circulation, the reference interaction in which knowledge reveals itself to be created between subjects rather than springing forth ex nihilo as the stuff of individual genius. But the individualist myth of exhaustiveness is pervasive, even if it is persistently exhausting. Such tiresome individualism is, of course, profoundly entangled with whiteness, serving as an animating force in well-worn colonial narratives of race: the unhinged white loner as mass shooter, as contrasted with the terrorist motivated by collective cultural allegiance; the intrepid white explorer 'discovering' the land through economic enterprise; the dark masses of migrants threatening to flood the white nation's border, containable only through mass detention, expulsion, or assimilation; the dispossession of a black single mother read as black cultural pathology. More specifically, it aligns epistemologically with the individualism of liberal racial politics: racism as an attribute of individuals, anti-racism as self-work, the problem and solution collocated and self-contained

The atrocities committed against the Native Americans of North America are evident in stark statistics provided by the United to End Genocide, the largest activist organization operating in the United States today. When the first European explorers set foot in North America in the 15th century, an estimated 10 million or so natives inhabited the vast terrain. 5 centuries later, that number had plummeted to 300,000.

Complementing the imposing stone edifice of the Palace of Colonies were three “traditional” African villages, with houses built of bamboo and thatch in the Bangala style. Two of them were located along a large pool, with dugout canoes at the waterfront. The third village was away from the water in the trees. Palm trees and other tropical vegetation were planted in and around the villages to give them an air of authenticity. The European visitors were not allowed to enter the villages, but they could watch from behind iron fences, much as they would watch animals in a zoo. A sign proclaimed, “Do not feed the blacks. They are already being fed.

we explored the possibility that Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were not merely victims of this nation’s imperial history and subsequent beneficiaries of its crises of conscience, but rather agents whose resistance not only contributed to their own liberation but also put pressure on and reshaped some British ideas about freedom and who could be free?

The outcome of colonialism has been a controlling or blocking of interconnectivity and interdependence in related arenas: the environment (where rivers are dammed, channeled, or drained and natural geographies replaced by grids), in societies (where communities are divided in a pseudologic of superiority/inferiority), in economies (where resources like trees, coal, or oil are extracted as rapidly and brutally as possible without regard for surrounding destruction and pollution), and thought (where knowledge is organized under the rubrics of specialization, expertise, and compartmentalization, affected by racism and Eurocentrism). Colonialism, globalization, and development planning are ways of thinking as well as ways of life, and we need to find their alternatives, islands where other ways of life are explored through the resurgence of interconnectivity at local levels, creating dialogue among diverse points of view and projects of counter-development and liberation. When we take the idea of colonialism out of its location in history texts as a period of conquest located in the past, and begin to think of it as a metaphor for a way to live in the environment, certain general patterns appear. Before colonialism, there were environments of interpenetrating local biodiversities with cyclic retreats and advances, in which human groups integrated and competed; after colonialism, there was a large-scale monoculture, control of land and resources by distant privileged elites who exploit and fragment local communities while polluting and destroying ecosystems. Before colonialism, there were many diverse cultural worlds, each its own center of meaning-making and language arts, with Europe at the periphery. After colonialism, cultures were ranked on a kind of "great chain of being" according to European notions of culture and development, with Europe at the center. As a corollary, individual subjectivities were ranked as to how completely they could think through decontextualized universals in European languages. One way to think about liberation psychologies is as an evolving and multiple set of projects of decolonization.

Should it not, this essentially producing country, search all parts of the globe and seek to fight with other nations, by exploring in advance the countries likely to favor industries, by studying local needs and resources, by indicating the nature and time of the shipments to be made, etc.?

For me, that connection was revealed in the 1960s, which marked the birth of consciousness. Our minds expanded on a mass scale like never before. Civil rights for minorities, women’s rights, gay rights; a politically active youth movement; the belief that questioning your government was a patriotic responsibility; environmental awareness; expansion of Eastern thinking; the end of colonialism; psychoactive substances; and of course, the Renaissance in all the Arts. That consciousness was founded on a few basic spiritual principles. The first was our fundamental understanding of our relationship to the Earth, and the vast gap between Western and Semitic religious belief, on one side, and American Indian, African, and Asian belief, on the other. Genesis 1:28 says, “And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion.’” What “God” meant by “subdue” and “have dominion” can (and should) be debated, but Western religion took it to suggest man’s superiority over the Earth. Man the conqueror. The other tradition—American Indians, Africans, Asians—did not believe that humans were superior to the Earth; rather, they believed that they were meant to live in harmony with it. This difference affected how we viewed our most essential relationship and contributed to a fundamental sense of alienation. That alienation was the first component of our spiritual bankruptcy. That was the theme explored more deeply on Revolution, but it would overlap with this one.

Richard Francis Burton was a British consul, Orientalist, explorer, best known today for translating the Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra into English. He was the most educated explorer of the Victorian age, a time when only men of rough disposition set out to discover foreign lands, in stark contrast to the landed gentry, who were uninterested in international travel, unless it was in the comfort of a steamship to go administer a colony for the sake of the Crown or as a military officer deployed to extend the global landholdings of the British Empire. He

To faculty everywhere, the lesson was obvious: the campus of a top university is not a place for intellectual exploration. It is a luxury home, rented for four to six years, nine months at a time, by children of the elite who may shout at faculty as if they’re berating clumsy maids in a colonial mansion. A

For centuries now, explorers have been trying to find this fabled land of barter- none with success. Adam Smith set his story in aboriginal North America (others preferred Africa or the Pacific). In Smith’s time, at least it could be said that reliable information on Native American economic systems was available in Scottish libraries. But by mid-century, Lewis Henry Morgan’s descriptions of the six nations of the Iroquois, among others, were widely published- and they made clear that the main economic institution among the Iroquois nations were longhouses where most goods were stockpiled and then allocated by women’s councils, and no one ever traded arrowheads for slabs of meat. Economists simply ignored this information. Stanley Jevons, for example, who in 1871 wrote what has come to be considered the classic book on the origins of money, took his examples straight from Smith, with Indians swapping venison for elk and beaver hides, and made no use of actual descriptions of Indian life that made it clear that Smith had simply made this up. Around that same time, missionaries, adventurers, and colonial administrators were fanning out across the world, many bringing copies of Smith’s book, expecting to find the land of Barter. None ever did. They discovered and almost endless variety of economic systems. But to this day, no one has been able to locate a part of the world where the ordinary mode of economic transition between neighbours takes the form of “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow.

Earthquake, sir, BIG earthquake!’ he repeated enthusiastically. He was bursting with eagerness to talk; so, for that matter, was everyone else. An extraordinary joie de vivre had come over them all as soon as the shaky feeling departed from their legs. An earthquake is such fun when it is over. It is so exhilarating to reflect that you are not, as you well might be, lying dead under a heap of

In these happy times, when we poor blacks are being uplifted by the mighty western civilization, with its manifold blessings such as the cinematograph, machine-guns, syphilis, etc., what subject could be more inspiring than the private lives of our European benefactors? We think therefore that it may interest our readers to hear something of events in the up-country district of Kyauktada. And especially of Mr Macgregor, honoured Deputy Commissioner of said district. Mr Macgregor is of the type of the Fine Old English Gentleman, such as, in these happy days, we have so many examples before our eyes. He is ‘a family man’ as our dear English cousins say. Very much a family man is Mr Macgregor. So much so that he has already three children in the district of Kyauktada, where he has been a year, and in his last district of Shwemyo he left six young progenies behind him. Perhaps it is an oversight on Mr Macgregor’s part that he has left these young infants quite unprovided for, and that some of their mothers are in danger of starvation, etc., etc., etc. There

Their next option was Australia. Its eastern seaboard had been explored by the great seafarer Captain James Cook. On April 29, 1770, Cook landed in a wonderful inlet, which he called Botany Bay in honor of the rich species found there by the naturalists traveling with him. This seemed like an ideal location to British government officials. The climate was temperate, and the place was as far out of sight and mind as could be imagined. A fleet of eleven ships packed with convicts was on its way to Botany Bay in January 1788 under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip. On January 26, now celebrated as Australia Day, they set up camp in Sydney Cove, the heart of the modern city of Sydney. They called the colony New South Wales.

I began to read more. The further I explored, the more it was clear that the Congo of a century ago had indeed seen a death toll of Holocaust dimensions.

Olaudah Equiano, born sometime around 1745 in a rural community somewhere within the confines of the Kingdom of Benin. Kidnapped from his home at the age of eleven, Equiano was eventually sold to British slavers operating in the Bight of Biafra, from whence he was conveyed first to Barbados, then to a plantation in colonial Virginia. Equiano’s further adventures—and there were many—are narrated in his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, published in 1789. After spending much of the Seven Years’ War hauling gunpowder on a British frigate, he was promised his freedom, denied his freedom, sold to several owners—who regularly lied to him, promising his freedom, and then broke their word—until he passed into the hands of a Quaker merchant in Pennsylvania, who eventually allowed him to purchase his liberty. Over the course of his later years he was to become a successful merchant in his own right, a best-selling author, an Arctic explorer, and eventually, one of the leading voices of English Abolitionism. His eloquence and the power of his life story played significant parts in the movement that led to the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807.

The mystery of what happened to Easter Island’s civilization has haunted generations of writers and scientists. There are no trees on Easter Island because the Easter Islanders cut them all down. They deforested their island in the building and transportation of those giant stone heads. In the process of deforesting the island, they also started a downward spiral that drove their civilization to collapse. Easter Island serves as an object lesson for the interaction between an isolated, habitable environment and a civilization using that environment’s resources: they did it to themselves. The parallel to our current situation on Earth seems clear. In his 2007 bestseller, Collapse , anthropologist Jared Diamond unpacked that parallel. His work explored the trajectories of a number of human civilizations that disappeared at the height of their vibrancy and power. Diamond’s examples included the Anasazi of the American southwest, the Maya, and the Norse colony on Greenland. In each case, the civilization overshot the carrying capacity of its environment. Their populations grew as the society became ever more ingenious at extracting resources from its surroundings. Eventually, the limits to growth were hit. A short time after running into those limits, each civilization fell apart. Easter Island was the

To those who had lived in Africa for millennia, of course, “there was nothing to discover, we were here all the time,” as a future African statesman would put it. But to nineteenth-century Europeans, celebrating an explorer for “discovering” some new corner of Africa was, psychologically, a prelude to feeling that the continent was theirs for the taking.

Central Africa was a region without writing, but not without a history. Hundreds, yea thousands of years of human history preceded the arrival of the Europeans. If a heart of darkness existed back then, it was sooner to be found in the ignorance with which white explorers viewed the area than in the area itself. Darkness, too, is in the eye of the beholder.

According to the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BC, 'There lies out in the deep off Libya [Africa] an island of considerable size, and situated as it is in the ocean it is a distant from Libya a voyage of a number of days to the west. Its land is fruitful, much of it being mountainous and not a little being a level plain of surpassing beauty. Through it flow navigable rivers ...' Diodorus goes on to tell us how Phoenician mariners, blown off course in a storm, had discovered this Atlantic island with navigable rivers quite by chance. Soon its value was recognized and its fate became the subject of dispute between Tyre and Carthage, two of the great Phoenician cities in the Mediterranean: 'The Tyrians ... purposed to dispatch a colony to it, but the Carthaginians prevented their doing so, partly out of concern lest many inhabitants of Carthage should remove there because of the excellence of the island, and partly in order to have ready in it a place in which to seek refuge against an incalculable turn of fortune, in case some total disaster should overtake Carthage. For it was their thought that since they were masters of the sea, they would thus be able to move, households and all, to an island which was unknown to their conquerors.' Since there are no navigable rivers anywhere to the west of Africa before the seafarer reaches Cuba, Haiti and the American continent, does this report by Diodorus rank as one of the earliest European notices of the New World?