Random Quotes

Dr Nise da Silveira, born on 15 February 1905 in Maceió; died on 30 October 1999 in Rio de Janeiro, was one of Brazil’s most important scientists*, psychiatrist, alchemist of the psyche and Marxist, who resolutely defined new paths through the fields of medicine, philosophy and art. Her work was characterised by her rejection of the invasive methods of psychiatry that were common at the time. She was the only female graduate alongside 157 men. Nise da Silveira completed her specialist training as a psychiatrist at the Antonio Austregésilo Neurological Clinic and in the same year won a national competition for a post in psychopathology and mental health care at Praia Vermelha Hospital.
When she was employed at the Pedro II Psychiatric Centre in Engenho de Dentro, Nise da Silveira rejected the practices of lobotomy, insulin shock or cardiazole shock therapy and was then transferred to the occupational therapy department. There she enabled her patients to develop personally and artistically. In particular, she led art therapy sessions, through which, according to her understanding, subconscious states of the psyche became accessible. Nise da Silveira, the “psiquiatra rebelde”, revolutionised the history of psychiatry beyond the borders of her country and was a forerunner in the worldwide movements of psychiatric forms in Brazil, England, Italy and Germany between the 1960s and 1980s. She advocated the humanisation of treatment methods for chronically mentally ill patients and created the “Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente”, which was also her study and research centre. After her death, her private archive was included in UNESCO’s “Memory of the World” programme as a heritage of humanity, a digital collection of historical documents of exceptional value to human history.

Image/source: Arquivo Nise da Silveira, https://revistacult.uol.com.br

Livro –MELLO, L.. Encontros. Nise da Silveira. São Paulo: Azougue Editorial, 2009. Entrevistas e depoimentos que Nise da Silveira concedeu entre 1976 e 1997

In the wake of the Communist uprising in 1935, da Silveira founded the organisation “Uniao Feminina do Brasil” (UFB) together with intellectual and feminist activists. The women demanded legal changes that would grant women custody of their children after a divorce, equal pay with men and the right to maternity leave. These demands brought the UFB close to left-wing organisations, which in turn were linked to the Communist Party. On 19 July 1935, the ruling dictator President Getúlio Vargas signed Decree 246, which immediately ordered the closure of the UFB as an illegal organisation – less than two months after it was founded. A year later, Nise da Silveira was denounced by a nurse who had discovered Marxist literature in da Silveira’s locker. This was followed by 18 months in prison and a ban on practising her profession. In 1944, with the end of the dictatorship of President Getúlio Vargas after 15 years, democratic processes gained the political upper hand and the emancipation of society through education and art became a political concern.

Nise da Silveira was granted amnesty and transferred back to her previous position at the Pedro II Psychiatric Centre in Engenho de Dentro, Rio de Janeiro. She was deeply shocked by the invasive and, for her, brutal treatment methods that had become the norm in international psychiatry: Insulin shock therapy, electroshock, lobotomy (a neurosurgical operation in which steel needles are driven deep into the patient’s brain to sever the neural pathways between the thalamus and frontal lobe and parts of the grey matter). The Portuguese doctor António Egas Moniz (1874 – 1955) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1949 for the development of lobotomy. When Nise da Silveira was asked to apply these therapies herself, she flatly refused – which earned her the title “psiquiatra rebelde” from that moment on. For her, these methods were risky, aggressive and ineffective, akin to torture. She was convinced that “all these techniques […] represent an attack on the integrity of man in the noblest of his organs”. Sensitised to a life in captivity by her own imprisonment, she was equally horrified by the housing of the 1,500 or so schizophrenic patients at the time in closed rooms and walled courtyards.

In order to keep her job, the only solution offered to her was to be transferred to the neglected occupational therapy department. Even though the job had previously only consisted of cleaning and maintenance work, Nise da Silveira accepted the offer. She took over an unused administrative area of the hospital complex and founded the Secao de Terapeutica Ocupacional e Reabilitacao, the Occupational Therapy and Rehabilitation Section, on 9 September 1946, and from then on began her ground-breaking work. Nise da Silveira developed a clinical method based on affection and respect for the dignity of each person.

Nise da Silveira became known worldwide for the avant-garde idea of using affection as a scientific method in the treatment of mental illness. Empathy, commitment and charity overcame hospital walls, prejudice and abuse of patients. In 1956, Nise da Silveira founded the Casa das Palmeiras, the first Brazilian clinic for psychiatric treatment in the form of a day school.

Nise Da Silveira – Uma Psiquiatra Rebelde (Em Portuguese do Brasil), 1. Januar 2000
https://www.fembio.org/biographie.php/frau/biographie/nise-da-silveira/
Museu virtual – Ocupação Nise da Silveira – Itaú Cultural
Livro –MELLO, L.. Encontros. Nise da Silveira. São Paulo: Azougue Editorial, 2009. Entrevistas e depoimentos que Nise da Silveira concedeu entre 1976 e 1997

Memória do Mundo da UNESCO: Arquivo Pessoal de Nise da Silveira
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtUhmbHqeXM&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Frevistacult.uol.com.br%2F&source_ve_path=MjM4NTE&feature=emb_title
Nise, el corazón de la locura.. (subtitulada)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcLpV3a_hZ4&t=2953s
Nise da Silveira – Posfácio: Imagens do Inconsciente
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDg0zjMe4nA
Leon Hirszman, Imagens do Inconsciente
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxYx4obbARE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-uN1lsWFjM&t=4322s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgong5EYqUE&t=3585s
Robert Berliner, Nise – O Coracao da Loucura (Nise – in the Heart of Madness)QUEM É NISE DA SILVEIRA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbWP3JEUV1s

The text “Yemenici Bali” (Bali the shoemaker’s boy) comes from the book Dellakname-i Dilküsa (The Book on Bath Servants) from the 17th century, made famous in more recent times by the journalist Murat Bardakçı. “It is one of the rare erotic texts by the Ottomans that has been passed down to our time” (Erdoğan 1998). 1680 is an approximate date.

Quoted by Sema Nilgün Erdoğan (1998, German): Sexuelles Leben bei den Osmanen. Istanbul: Dönence.

Sexual contact between men was just as much a part of the Ottoman Empire as men’s poetry and fantasies about young men. Young boys, who often conformed to specific ideals of beauty, were not viewed as living male beings, but as a kind of imperfect man or woman. For many Ottomans, sexual contact with them was part of gaining experience before marrying a woman. As a man, having a relationship with a woman meant a stable life marked by family planning, loyalty, and purely conjugal sex with one’s wife. In his book Desiring Arabs (2008), Joseph Massad also speaks of Western sexual models that were imposed. He compiles historical Arabic writings on sexual desire and conservative responses to them. There is also ample evidence of homosexual relationships from ancient Greece, especially between men in Sparta and, between women, on the island of Lesbos.

*Arabmediasociety.com, 21.01.2009: Book Review Desiring Arabs.

Party manifesto of the NPD. The extreme right-wing National Democratic Party of Germany was founded in 1964. In 2017, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that they bore a resemblance to the NSDAP in language and programme.

NPD (1996): Parteiprogramm.

The concept of culture is also used by right-wing extremists and charged with ethnic ideology (around blood and soil). The idea of purity and the segregation of cultures builds on the construct of race, as does that of the superiority or inferiority of individual cultures. In 2002, the NPD published a position paper on ethnopluralism, one of the New Right’s concepts. According to Kurt Lenk (2008), this is a mixture of social Darwinism (the struggle for existence) and racism, under the pretext of cultural self-determination. Ethnopluralism propagates the notion that each culture is self-contained and should not mix with others. This ideology has followers in Austria and France (the identitarian movement), as well as in Greece, the USA and South Africa.

DW.com (2019): Germany: Identitarian Movement Classified as Right-Wing Extremist.

Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was an Afro-Caribbean French writer and politician, founder of the Negritude movement that sought to liberate Black people from colonial rule.

Aimé Césaire (1968/2000)

In his 1950 essay On Colonialism, from which this quote comes, Césaire denounced the fact that while colonialism feigned a desire to “civilise”, its real goal was always exploitation (1968: 8). Both the colonised and European proletarians, he wrote, had understood this long ago (1968: 6). Here, Césaire posited a problematic connection between the Holocaust and colonial genocide, writing that ‘what he [the European citizen] does not forgive Hitler [is] not the crime per se (…) but that it is a crime against white people’ (1968: 12). in a different vein, Michael Rothberg argues for a multidimensional culture of remembrance that does not set victims against each other. For an example of such a position, see the cooperation between Ibrahim Arslan, survivor of the racist arson attack in Mölln/Northwest Germany, and Ester Bejarano, Auschwitz survivor (Möllner Reden im Exil from 2013).

*Aimee Césaire (2000): Discourse on Colonialism. A Poetics of Anticolonialism.

Charlotte Wiedemann (*1954) is a journalist and author currently working on memory cultures and postcolonial thinking.

Quote translated after: Charlotte Wiedemann (2022): Den Schmerz der Anderen begreifen. Berlin: Ullstein Verlag, p. 54.
Picture: Anette Daugardt

The quote points out that Europeans see themselves as the founders of equality for all people, while at the same time, as former colonial powers, they refuse to come to terms with and compensate for colonial crimes. Every step must be claimed, fought for and negotiated by the victims. The quote is located in more recent discussions about global cultures of remembrance, in which the relationship between colonialism and National Socialism in particular is being debated. In her journalistic book, Wiedemann reconstructs concrete entanglements, simultaneities and contradictions between (post-)colonialism and (post-)National Socialism.

*Charlotte Wiedemann (2022): Repairing the Damage to Our Ethical Categories. A Conversation with Charlotte Wiedemann. Interview by Ferenc Laczó, in: The Review of Democracy.

The German rapper SadiQ is one of the most controversial German rappers today.

SadiQ “Heimat”

In his 2011 song Heimat (Heimat) he uses the anti-Semitic thesis of the “Great Exchange”, which is particularly widespread in the new Rake. This racist and anti-Semitic narrative is based on a Jewish elite who ship Muslims en masse to Europe in order to destabilize this continent. Therefore a resistance against Jewish and Muslim life should be legitimized. The assassin in Halle used this argumentation pattern to radicalize himself.

Sadiq – Heimat Liedtext | L-HIT.COM Lyrics

Mohammad Mossadegh (1882-1967) was an Iranian lawyer, politician and the first prime minister of independent Iran. The quote is from his speech in court in 1953, in which he defended himself against charges of high treason.

Mohammad Mossadeghs Biography

As part of a wave of anti-colonial movements, Mohammad Mossadegh became Iran’s first democratically elected prime minister in 1951. In the same year, he was voted Man of the Year by the US Time Magazine for making the nationalisation of British-controlled oil production his first official act. However, in 1952 Dwight D. Eisenhower came to power in the USA, and he promoted a strongly anti-communist course and condemned any form of nationalisation. The CIA had previously noted that the situation in Iran could only be “saved” with a “new prime minister” (File Foreign Relations of the United States 1951: 87). From 1953 onwards, the CIA incited the ruling elite in Iran against Mossadegh and bribed the population with money, as corroborated by documents published in 2017 (Deutsche Welle 2017). In Latin America (e.g. Chile 1973, Allende vs. Pinochet), Africa (e.g. 1961 in Congo, Lumumba vs. Mobuto) and Asia (e.g. 1967 in Indonesia, Sukarno vs. Suharto), governments also emerged from socialist or anti-colonial movements and were overthrown and replaced by dictatorships.

*Deutsche Welle (2017): 1953: Irans gestohlene Demokratie.
*Foreign Relations of the United States (1951-1954).
*Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (2013): Zwischen Kolonialismus und Nationenbildung.

Anonymous Danish development worker interviewed by Maria Eriksson Baaz for her book Paternalism of Partnership.

Maria Eriksson Baaz (2005): The Paternalism of Partnership. A Postcolonial Reading of Identity in Development Aid. London: Zed Books. p. 47

This quote exposes two common ways in which white people conceptualise culture: on the one hand, by completely negating differences and pretending that all people are the same (“colour blindness”). A primary problem with this view is that it does not take power relations into account. On the other hand, the quote also reveals an internalised sense of superiority. White people often assume that they themselves have reached the highest level (across different scales: development, democracy, etc.) and that other people or cultures still need to be developed.

*Timo Kiesel und Carolin Philipp (2011): White Charity. Blackness and Whiteness in Charity Advertisement. Documentary.

Thomas More (1478-1535) was an English lawyer and politician who was executed for high treason. In 1935 he was made a saint.

Thomas Morus (1516): Utopia.

From the end of the 15th century, many small holder tenant farmers, who practised subsistence farming (self-sufficiency), were driven off the land by large landowners. According to Silvia Federici (2014: 68), this land privatisation in Europe began at the same time as colonial expansion into the Americas, with which it was connected. In England, large landowners needed land for their sheep in order to be able to supply the textile manufacturers in Flanders / Belgium with more wool (the price of which had risen sharply). The consequences were rural exodus and impoverishment.

*Silvia Federici (2014): Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia.

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was an Austrian philosopher, esotericist and founder of anthroposophy. His works are still influential today, for example in Waldorf schools or in anthroposophic medicine.

Rudolf Steiner (1905): Die Grundbegriffe der Theosophie der Menschenrassen. In: Rudolf Steiner, Die Welträtsel und die Anthroposophie, Band 54. Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, p. 143.

Rudolf Steiner built on the racial theories of his time which he was familiar with, and developed them further into an anthroposophical, spiritual racial theory. Today, these ideas only play a secondary role in anthroposophy, yet anthroposophical institutions have yet to officially distance themselves from Steiner’s racial theories. Sonnenberg (2003: 21, quoted in the Waldorfblog) writes: ‘A critical reading of Steiner’s communications is rarely seen in anthroposophical circles as an opportunity to expand the horizon of knowledge, but rather as a threat to internal social plausibility and even power structures.’

*Waldorfblog: Waldorf und Rechtsextremismus.

Luis Rosadilla (b. 1953) was a guerrilla eith the Tupamaro in Uruguay during the military junta (1973-1985), and Minister of Defence under Pepe Mujica, who was also an ex-guerrilla.

From a letter to Lutz Taufer. Quoted in Taufer (2017): Über Grenzen. Vom Untergrund in die Favela. Berlin & Hamburg: Assoziation A, p. 178. The year (1988) is an approximation.

Questioning power also means thinking about alternatives. Creating something new is often more difficult than criticising what already exists. But in spite of difficult circumstances, people have always tried to make societies free, equal and just. And yet some alternatives were just as violent as the social models they aspired to overcome.
Many people have also died in the attempt to create a new social order. However, there are always experiments that inspire hope with their ideas of transforming systems of rule that have existed for centuries. This doesn’t always happen on a large scale, and often takes place through small projects. It can also involve whole regions; for example, the state of Chiapas in Mexico where the autonomous, democratic grassroots Zapatist@s live by the motto: ‘We advance by asking questions.’ The US historian Howard Zinn (2004) said: ‘To be hopeful (…) is by no means only foolishly romantic!’

*John Holloway (2005): The Concept of Power and the Zapatistas.
*Howard Zinn (2004): The Optimism of Uncertainty.

Henry Kissinger (born 1923) is a Republican politician and has held many positions, including that of US Secretary of State. He has been internationally criticised for his involvement in numerous government overthrows and for supporting authoritarian regimes (Argentina, Chile, Indonesia/East Timor). In 1973, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2013, an endowed professorship was set up at the University of Bonn in his honour at the initiative of the Federal Republic of Germany’s then Interior Minister de Maizière and Foreign Minister Westerwelle.

Henry Kissinger (1. August 1989): The Caricature of Deng as a Tyrant is Unfair. Washington Post.

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was known for his support of authoritarian regimes around the world. He is accused, amongst other things, of being linked to the assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 and the illegal bombing of Cambodian territory during the Vietnam War. In 1989, the pro-democracy movement in Beijing demonstrated in Tiananmen Square. The Chinese military brutally crushed protests, killing an estimated 2,000-7,000 and injuring 30,000. In the aftermath, 40,000 people were arrested and hundreds executed. According to Naomi Klein (2007: 185f.), referring to historian Maurice Meisner, China’s communist government cracked down hardest on factory workers. The liberal economic reforms in China in the 1980s (president Deng Xiaoping had taken advice from Milton Friedman, the neoliberal icon) did not produce the hoped-for political liberalisation.

*Democracy Now (11.08.2016): Declassified Documents Show Kissinger Role in Argentine Dirty War.
*Naomi Klein (2007): The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada.

Helmut Schmidt (1918-2015) was an SPD politician and Federal Chancellor of Germany from 1974 to 1982.

Die ZEIT, 05.02.1982.

In the early 1980s, despite the end of the Fordist labour regime, debates about repatriation intensified. One of the common lines of argument came from within politics, whether the governing Conservatives or the opposition Social Democrats: the number of migrants should be reduced and a second cycle of repatriation campaigns organised. What was not taken into account was the increasing number of right-wing groups and of de facto hate crimes against migrants, which took place in the shadow of governing parties’ racist discourses on foreign infiltration and their population ideologies. The victims were thereby made into perpetrators because “Germany” risked being overburdened. Today, this ideological turn legitimises what has become morally and socially acceptable neo-racism in the highly industrialised and “enlightened” Global North.

*DOMID (2021): 60 years Almanya – Migration from Turkey.

Achille Mbembe (*1957) is a post-colonial theorist, philosopher and historian. He is a professor at the Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg.

Quote: Achille Mbembe (2017): Critique of Black Reason. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 176-177.
Picture: Wikimedia. Creative Commons.

Mbembe develops a critical reflection on the Western notion of reason and rationality. He examines current dynamics of colonialism, racism and resistance and attempts to explore possibilities for a more just and solidary world order. He attempts to show the extent to which the goal of anti-colonial liberation struggles, the right to equal participation for all, remains relevant for the present day.

*Achille Mbembe (2017): Critique of Black Reason. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
*Achille Mbembe (July 1, 2021): Notes on Late Eurocentrism. Translated by Carolyn Shread. Critical Inquiry.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was one of the most important German Enlightenment philosophers.

Source of the German original: Karl Bremer (1996): G.W.F. Hegel. Vorlesungen, Ausgewählte Nachschriften und Manuskripte (1822/1823). Bd. 12. Hamburg: Meiner, p. 98-100.

During the Enlightenment, the idea emerged that societies owed their ongoing development to reason. In order to achieve a higher level of development, it was considered necessary to control and subjugate nature, along with those people who were termed primitive peoples. According to G.F.W. Hegel, only white people possessed the “reason” necessary for progress, which is why they had to “humanise” the rest of the world. Africa was considered to be a continent without history in which people “did not develop”. Europeans justified colonial violence through the philosophical construction of their superiority.

*Rebekah Nicholson (2006): The Enlightenment and Its Effects on the Haitian
Revolution of 1789-1804.
*Eduardo Grüner (2008): “Haiti: a (forgotten) philosophical revolution.”

Sitting Bull (ca. 1831-1890) whose actual name was Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake. He was a leader and healer of the Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux.

Bob Blaisdell (2014): The Dover Anthology of American Literature. From 1865 to 1922. p. 77.

Today’s USA was populated by European migrants as a settler colony. Here, Sitting Bull was speaking as a Native American about the experience of genocidal policies during that colonisation. The Sioux leader, who is admired to this day, mourned the dispossession of the Native Americans. At the same time, through the analysis it presents, the quote also provides information about how Sitting Bull perceived and analysed settlement policies, mass murder and wars, as well as the new culture that was brought to his country with the white man.

*Dee Brown (1970): Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. An Indian History of the American West. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa (1745-1797), according to his autobiography, was captured by European slave traders with his sister in present-day Nigeria and taken to the Americas. After several changes of ownership, he learned to read, write and trade, and was thus able to buy his freedom with the money he had earned. In his autobiography, he described slavery’s cruelty, and became an activist in the anti-slavery movement.

Olaudah Equiano (1789): The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African.

The transatlantic slave trade and the plantation economy which existed from the late 15th to the mid 19th centuries are understood as preconditions for economic boom in Europe and poverty in Africa. The Guyanese Marxist historian Walter Rodney wrote: “Western Europe was developed by Africa, just as Africa was underdeveloped by Western Europe” (Rodney 1972/2012:75). More than 12 million Africans were transported to the Americas (Ronald Segal 1995: 4 and David Eltis & David Richards: 2010), and a fifth of the enslaved died during the crossing. In the Americas, they were forced to work on sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations, amongst other things. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker describe how enslaved Africans, European proletarians, Caribbean and North American Native Americans together formed a hybrid culture of resistance against the violence of unfolding capitalism (2008: 190ff.).

*Walter Rodney (1975/2012): How Europe underdeveloped Afrika. Cape Town: Pambazuka Press.
*Peter Linebaugh & Marcus Rediker (2000): The Many-Headed Hydra. The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. London: Verso.
*Webseite Slave Voyages

August Bebel (1840-1913) was a German politician who founded the organised labour movement in Germany, and was considered the father of German social democracy.

Reichtstagsprotokoll from 01.12.1906

August Bebel’s speech in the Reichstag, from which the quote comes, was a contribution to the debate on how to deal with the war of annihilation against the Herero and Nama in what was then the German colony of German Southwest Africa (from 1904 to 1908). Bebel favoured a “civilising mission”: i.e. colonisation no longer as a “means of destruction” but as a “means of preservation”. This way of thinking was based on a racist concept of culture and a division between “civilised” and “primitive” peoples. The self-proclaimed civilised peoples thus legitimised their rule over and education of others. There were bitter disputes among the social democrats about colonial politics (see Kautsky 1907). Eduard Bernstein and Gustav Noske were not entirely averse to colonialism, while Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Karl Kautsky were staunch opponents.

*International Press Correspondence (1928): Social Democracy and the Colonial Question.

Padre José de Acosta (ca. 1539-1600) was a Spanish Jesuit. After teaching at the university in Spain, he travelled to the Americas as a missionary in 1570. He is the author of the Historia natural y moral de las Indias from which the quote is taken.

Padre Joseph de Acosta (1589): Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias. Sevilla: Casa de Juan de Leon, p. 26.

It was by labelling the indigenous population of the Americas as bestial, cannibalistic, devil worshippers and so on, that the Spaniards justified their conquests. This is how they disguised their pursuit of gold and silver as a civilising mission (Federici 2009: 221). These accounts, reproduced by de Acosta and others, helped the Spanish crown acquire complete authority over the Americas from the Pope in 1508, and were the bases for justifying subjugation, enslavement, rape, torture and annihilation. Some pre-colonial societies in the Americas did indeed engage in mass human sacrifice. However, there was no comparison between these and the almost complete annihilation of the indigenous population organised by the Spaniards, which the Dominican monk Bartolomé de las Casas, amongst others, described. According to Cortés, 100,000 people died in the conquest of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan in 1521 (ibid.: 222).

*James Cockcroft (1983): Mexico: Class Formation, Capital Accumulation and the State. New York: Monthly Review Press, p. 19
*Silvia Federici (2014): Caliban und die Hexe. Frauen, der Körper und die ursprüngliche Akkumulation. Wien: Mandelbaum kritik & utopie, p. 267ff.

Anonymous enslaved person in Barbados

Citation: Anonymous (1676): Great Newes from the Barbadoes, Or, A True and Faithful Account of the Grand Conspiracy of the Negroes against the English and the Happy Discovery of the Same with the Number of Those That Were Burned Alive, Beheaded, and Otherwise Executed for Their Horrid Crimes. With a Short Discription of That Plantation. London: L. Curtis, p. 6f.
Image: Wikimedia

After the inhabitants of Barbados were kidnapped and enslaved or expelled by Portugal in the 16th century, England took possession of the island in 1625 (until 1962). English and Irish serfs, enslaved Africans and American Indians were settled as plantation workers for sugar cane cultivation, exploited, tortured and murdered. They fought back – often together – by fleeing, arson, manslaughter and revolt. In the Caribbean, as well as in other parts of the Americas, resistant former enclaved people formed so-called maroon communities (Linebaugh & Rediker 2008).

*Peter Linebaugh & Marcus Rediker (2008): The Many-Headed Hydra. The hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic. Hamburg: Association A.