Decolonisation Quotes

“You could read a dozen large tomes on the history of Islam from its very beginnings and you still wouldn't understand what is going on in Algeria. But read 30 pages on colonialism and decolonisation and then you'll understand quite a lot.”
― Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong

“Jim Thunder, at seventy-five the youngest of the speakers, is a round brown man of serious demeanor who spoke only in Potawatomi. He began solemnly, but as he warmed to his subject his voice lifted like a breeze in the birch trees and his hands began to tell the story. He became more and more animated, rising to his feet, holding us rapt and silent although almost no one understood a single word. He paused as if reaching the climax of his story and looked out at the audience with a twinkle of expectation. One of the grandmothers behind him covered her mouth in a giggle and his stern face suddenly broke into a smile as big and sweet as a cracked watermelon. He bent over laughing and the grandmas dabbed away tears of laughter, holding their sides, while the rest of us looked on in wonderment. When the laughter subsided, he spoke at last in English: "What will happen to a joke if no one will hear it any more? How lonely those words will be, when their is power gone. Where will they go? Off to join the stories that can never be told again.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people's experience in history.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature

“In this becalmed zone the sea has a smooth surface, the palm-tree stirs gently in the breeze, the waves lap against the pebbles and raw materials are ceaselessly transported, justifying the presence of the settler; and all the while the native, bent double, near dead than alive, exists interminably in an unchanging dream. The settler makes history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey... Over against him torpid creatures, wasted by fever, obsessed by ancestral customs, form an almost inorganic background for the innovating dynamism of colonial mercantilism.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“Angry is a way for power holders To dismiss and deligitmize activism and protest”
― Andrea Warner, Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography

“I wrote in my diary: ‘Suddenly to be not Harry but just a foreigner – a Britisher in an alien world – a representative of an exploiting dominant power.’ Reading that comment now is a reminder of the thinness of the Hong Kong University world I almost exclusively inhabited… pg203”
― Harry Ricketts, First Things

“Virtually every fact used in business, political life and every day human relations is derived from other 'facts' or assumptions that have been shaped, deliberately or not, by the preexisting power structure. Every fact thus has a power history and what may be called a power future.”
― Alvin Toffler, Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century

“The relation between the SS's Hindutva and its Mafia Character is one of inverse proportionality: on a number of occasions, the SS called off Hindu nationalist agitations in exchange for money. The Shiv Sena(SS) support to the Indira Gandhi's Emergency dictatorship should be seen in the same light; it was the only "communal" organisation not to be banned.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism