Lessons from post-colonialism
This is a follow-on to the previous post Colonialism reloaded — it explored examples where colonialism persisted under various guises — here a further example offered a few more lessons to be drawn from this brilliant speech. In the follow-on post, our youth picking up these themes in protest point to our future.
Update: in French here for francophone Global South mostly in W Africa.
Update 2: introducing “Atmospheric Colonisation” as 21st c. derivative @ bottom
Update 3: see last post of this mini-series (and of all series) here.
In this video, “Kenyan ambassador to the United Nations Security Council explains how Africans understand Ukraine, and places Russian aggression in its post-colonial context” (YouTube intro). I transcribed the significant part of the speech in that political context, starting at 1:55.
We must complete our recovery [ from Colonialism ] from the embers of dead empires in ways that do not plunge us back into ways of domination and oppression. We rejected irredentism and expansionism on any basis, including racial, religious, ethnic or cultural factors, and we reject it again.
Its body intersted me as map-maker, as I understand now why borders were kept as-is après-colonies. I transcribed the relavant part starting at 0:45.
Instead we would settle for the borders that we inherited [from Colonialism]. But we would still assume continental, politcal, economical and legal integration. Rather than form nations that looked ever backward into history with a dangerous nostalgia, we chose to look forward to a greatness none of our many nations and peoples had ever known. We chose to follow the rules of the Oragansation of African Unity and the United Nations Charter, not because our borders satisfied us, but because we wanted something greater forged in peace.
Iimagined that one role of UN might’ve been to help redraw those borders, given the tools at hand my speciality provided (geographic info systems or GIS). Aside from being ignorant of the facts presented here, I caught myself being latter-day colonialist myself: I thought that the Global South needed my Global North thinking, when in fact I had not even checked with them first!
This is no thought experiment either, as at Esri in So. Cal. I once cooled my heels outside its president Jack Dangermond’s office: my meeting was sandwiched between one phone call to Kofi Annan about GIS @ UN, and another to Benazir Bhutto on women’s education in Pakistan... That was the pinnacle of my career almost exactly 20 years ago!
And I learned someting new today! My late fave gran quipped “learn one new thing a day, love, and you shall stay young.” That’s today sorted…
Dec. 2023 update: “Learn a new thing a day…” cont’d
Envisioning environmental equity: climate change, health, and racial justice
The Lancet
This dynamic can be understood as a process of atmospheric colonisation.87 Just as land and territories have been colonised in the past, so too have the atmospheric commons been appropriated by wealthy countries for their own enrichment, through forms of industrialisation and growth that have relied on colonial patterns of appropriation, with devastating consequences for all life on Earth.88 In this way, climate change showcases colonialism as a historically rooted, yet ongoing structure, that governs and shapes our lives, “which are co-constitutive of processes of capitalism, imperialism, and international development”.18
This visualisation shows not only where economic, social, and political dominance lies, but also which economies are more responsible for repairing damage.
