Could I say that the reason that I am here today, you know, from the mouth of the State Department itself, is: I should not be allowed to travel because I have struggled for years for the independence of the colonial peoples of Africa.
South Africa was to evolve into the most pernicious example of the criminal practise of colonial and white minority domination.
Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? Is it a legacy of our colonial years? We want foreign television sets. We want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported?
Once Europe's colonial empires were sent into deep decline, thanks to World War II, America became globalization's primary replicating force, integrating Asia into its low-end production networks across the second half of the twentieth century - just like Europe had integrated the U.S. before.
The question shouldn't be 'Are we guilty about our colonial past;' it should be 'Why aren't we more guilty about our corporate present'?
The struggles to overturn colonial rule were long and often bitter. But, over time, most were inevitably successful.
Between 1945 and 1965, the number of colonial people ruled by the British monarch plunged from 700 million to five million. In 1956, just three years after the coronation, the Suez canal crisis and Anthony Eden's humiliation ended all notions that Britain was a world superpower.
The Catholic Church was the church of the colonial fascist regime.
Harriet Washington, in 'Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present,' documents the smallpox experiments Thomas Jefferson performed on his Monticello slaves. In fact, much of what we now think of as public health emerged from the slave system.
England was the first true colonial power to use its dominion over a large part of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, North America, and many Caribbean islands, in the first half of the 20th century.
Across the Atlantic, in the scattered, far-flung, rural settlements of colonial America, hospitality had become a central concern, and hostesses, like peacocks displaying their iridescent plumage, tried to outdo one another with their creative food displays.
I was lucky to get to Oxford. I am now an honorary fellow of my old college, which is nice, particularly for a colonial like me.
The colonial period has been the proving ground in America for the new social history, which concentrates on the ordinary doings of ordinary people rather than on high culture and high politics. Unfortunately ordinary people, almost by definition, leave behind only faint traces of their existence.
The landlord of colonial days may not have been the greatest man in town, but he was certainly the best-known, often the most popular, and ever the most picturesque and cheerful figure.
I read Gide's 'The Immoralist' over and over as a teenager. I was obsessed with it. It's written with such simplicity and dread, and the desert, the shabby colonial world, is brought right into your consciousness without being over-explained.
Thankfully, Australia has emerged from its inauspicious colonial beginnings to become a proud nation, a nation that overcame those primeval prejudices.
Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy, the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man: those four million souls whom the nation had used and degraded, and on whom the South had built an oligarchy similar to the colonial imperialism of today, erected on cheap colored labor and raising raw material for manufacture.
The eight-year-long Algerian war was to bring down six French prime ministers, open the door to de Gaulle - and come close to destroying him, too. The war was the last of the grand-style colonial struggles, but, perhaps more to the point, it was also the first campaign in which poorly equipped Muslim mujahedin licked one of the top Western armies.
You have to realize that up until about 1959, Africa was dominated by the colonial powers. And by the colonial powers of Europe having complete control over Africa, they projected Africa always in a negative light - jungles, savages, cannibals, nothing civilized.
There is something inexpressibly sad in the thought of the children who crossed the ocean with the Pilgrims and the fathers of Jamestown, New Amsterdam, and Boston, and the infancy of those born in the first years of colonial life in this strange new world.
I have seen Colonial churches since I was very small, Colonial painting and polychrome sculpture. And that was all I saw. There was not a single modern painting in any museum, not a Picasso, not a Braque, not a Chagall. The museums had Colombian painters from the eighteenth century and, of course, I saw Pre-Columbian art. That was my exposure.
