In the past few months I have, I confess, fallen very seriously off the writing wagon atop which, back in 2019, I had vowed to ride into the future. My only defense is that I keep getting carried away by other kinds of broadly educational projects that seem at the time to be both urgent … Continue reading The 500-year project
Sometimes, you find a book. And sometimes, when you are ready for it, a book finds you. Such has been my experience this past week with Sven Lindqvist’s slim 1992/96 volume “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide. In recent weeks, as alert readers … Continue reading To Zinder
I’ve been researching and thinking a lot about the forms of settler colonialism unleashed and maintained by “White” European nations– mainly, my own people-of-birth, the British– against people of color in many parts of the world. At times, doing this research– reading these accounts, seeing and trying to understand these pictures– makes me deeply, deeply … Continue reading The British genocides against Australian First Nations
Today, an Air Algerie plane conveyed to the Houari Boumedienne International Airport in Algiers the mortal remains of Sheikh Ahmed Bouziane, commander of a native-Algerian force overpowered by the invading French in Zaatcha, Algeria, in November 1849, and 23 other members of the defeated Algerian defense force. According to this account by Madjid Zerrouky in … Continue reading The unbearable legacies of settler colonialism
Alert readers will recall that last week I wrote about re-reading Ryszard Kapuscinski’s amazing book Another Day of Life, which is about the 1975 collapse of Portugal’s empire in Africa. This was part of my current investigation of the phenomenon of imperial decline, in general. The collapse of Portugal’s worldwide (mainly African) empire is an … Continue reading Exploring imperial decline with Kapuscinski and Farrusco
