colonialism

Friday, November 22nd, 2013

Why are historians suddenly looking at Sweden’s colonial past?

It is, to a surprisingly large extent, a story that’s been going on since the Second World War. Sweden–it is said–is different from the rest of Europe. After all, “The world’s conscience” (as newspapers in the West would usually describe Sweden in shorthand) had never been properly colonialist. As historian Gunlög Fur explains: “Colonialism was defined as...

Thursday, November 21st, 2013

File under: Dutch Liberalism

In the Netherlands, many people convince themselves that racism is something that exists elsewhere–in South Africa, for example, or in the United States. For this is a ‘tolerant,’ liberal nation. To maintain the facade, often blatant...

Monday, November 18th, 2013

Aidan Hartley’s Africa

In Aidan Hartley’s Africa, the progress of the continent is measured by its hospitability to white people and animals. Hartley was a war correspondent turned Wild Life columnist for The (British) Spectator magazine. A white Kenyan, he...

Saturday, September 28th, 2013

What are the “unintended consequences of Dutch colonialism”?

In their documentary installation piece "Empire: The unintended consequences of colonialism," filmmaker team Eline Jongsma and Kel O’Neill seek out the residue of centuries of Dutch imperialist projects, highlighting what they have referred to as the “humanity”...

Friday, July 12th, 2013

Eating Nando’s in Gaborone

I spent part of last month at the biennial gathering of historians organised by the Southern African Historical Society. The conference at the University of Botswana was fantastic. Gaborone was, well, less so.* I think that the city is best...

Monday, May 13th, 2013

Did Britain’s MI6 have Patrice Lumumba murdered?

Africa is a Country readers may not regularly check the London Review of Books, a British literary magazine with a circulation just over 50,000–it’s meant more for Bloomsbury than Bamako or Bloemfontein (though some readers could probably...