The Stories That Europe Tells Itself About Its Colonial History
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie breaking it down…
“She said once she was shocked that her son while being taught Belgian history, was taught nothing about Congo. She said “They teach my son in school that he must help the poor Africans, but they don’t teach him about what Belgium did in Congo.” Of course, all countries are evasive about the past for which they feel ashamed, but I was shocked by what seemed to me not evasiveness but an erasure of history.
If her son doesn’t learn that the modern Congo State began a hundred years ago as the personal property of a Belgian king, who was desperate to get wealthy from ivory and rubber, if her son doesn’t learn that the hands of Congolese people were chopped off for not producing enough resources to meet the king’s greed, if her son doesn’t learn that the Belgian government later led Congo with a deliberate emphasis on not producing an educated class, so that Congolese could become clerks and mechanics but couldn’t go to university, if her son doesn’t learn that more recently, even thought it was the Americans who installed the Mobutu’s dictatorship, Belgium was a major force behind the scenes propping him off, if this young Belgian boy, knows nothing about these incidents, then, at some point, they would perhaps no longer have happened because the past after all is the past because we collectively acknowledged that it is so.
This young Belgian boy would grow up to see Africa only as a place that requires his aid, his help, his charity with no complications for him. A place that can help him show how compassionate he can be, and most of all, a place whose present has no connection to Europe.
It is not that Europe has denied its colonial history. Instead, Europe has developed a way of telling the story of its colonial history that ultimately seeks to erase that history”
So much love for this woman <3
I get pissed off anytime I see or hear the words “Gouden Eeuw” (Golden Age). Dutch people are so proud that such a small country had such a big role in world politics, that we ‘controlled the seas’ with our fantastic VOC. Go fuck yourselves. It was golden for white people, and only because you were fucking killing and enslaving everyone else. Now you want to teach us all about how GREAT ‘we’ were and mention slavery like ‘oh yeah, and we transported slaves from here to there and this is what the ships looked like and scurvy and yeah so now we’re talking about pirates and shit because they’re much cooler BTW WE WERE POWNING EVERYONE EVEN THOUGH WE’RE TINY ISN’T THAT AWESOME ALSO SPICES WE WERE GOOD AT TRADING’. Just stfu. Please. If you’re going to belittle slavery, just STFU.
(via moniquemallo)
