Harald Martenstein (born 1953) is a German journalist and author. He has been awarded numerous prizes.

Harald Martenstein (27.10.2015): Über Mittel gegen die Ursachen des Flüchtlingsstroms. ZEITmagazin.

Colonialism has a history as long as its playing down, romanticising and justification for humanitarian ends. In many former colonial powers, e.g. in Europe, North America and Japan, there is little knowledge or awareness of the violent effects of colonial conquest and genocide, partly because colonialism is not part of the school curriculum. As a result, authors like Martenstein can continue to spread stories that promote colonialism as a civilising mission. The term “Maafa” (Swahili for great misfortune) as used by Marimba Anis is intended as a replacement of the trivial term “colonialism”. Maulana Karenga also brought the term African Holocaust into the discussion, since Maafa can also be translated as “accident” and thus does not imply intention.

*David Spurr (1993): The Rhetoric of Empire. Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Christopher Columbus (ca. 1451-1506) was an Italian sailor and human trafficker. The search for a sea route to India led him to the Americas. Columbus played an important role in the colonisation of the continent.

Andres Bernaldez (1930): The Voyages of Christopher Columbus, Being the Journals of his First and Third, and the Letters Concerning his First and Last Voyages, to Which is Added the Account of his Second Voyage. London: The Argonaut Press.

European colonial expansion is often divided into three phases: [1] Spanish and Portuguese colonialism, mainly that of the Americas from the late 15th century, which was based on resource exploitation; [2] The British, French and Dutch colonisation of Asia and parts of the Americas and South Africa from the 17th century (with the support of the British East India Company and the Dutch West and East India Companies), together with settler colonialism in the Americas; and [3] the colonial division of Africa into European zones of influence at the end of the 19th century. Although the phases differed from each other, they all included the violent subjugation of local populations and a belief in white superiority that is already clear in Columbus’ quote. Colonisation was met with great resistance in many areas: in South Africa there were wars with the Xhosa from 1779 to 1879. The British conquest of India also lasted 100 years. In Algeria, it took the French 20 years to occupy the country.

*Al Jazeera (2019): Because Colonialism. 25min.
*Raoul Peck (2021): Exterminate All the Brutes. Trailer.
*Göran Olsson (2014): Concerning Violence. Trailer.

Mary Clarke, (date of birth unknown – 1984) was a Koori Aboriginal activist. The quote comes from a speech recorded at a meeting with journalists. The meeting was organised to speak out against the eviction of a woman and her children of multiracial decent from their home in Framlingham Settlement, Victoria, Australia.

Original source: Newspaper Melbourse Argus (22.02.1951). Reprinted in: Jan Chritchett (1998): Untold Stories: Memories and Lives of Victorian Kooris. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, p. 4.

Australia was one of Great Britain’s settler colonies. In 1770, James Cook claimed eastern Australia for the British Crown. He also put forward the idea of a prison colony to relieve overcrowded British prisons. In 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip landed in Sydney with 1,500 prisoners. It is estimated that between 1788 and 1900 up to 90% of Australia’s indigenous people were killed by introduced diseases, land dispossession and violent conflict. There were mass shootings, people were thrown in groups off cliffs or offered land poisoned with arsenic or other substances (Behrendt 2012: 274). George Reid, a politician from the Free Trade Party, said in an election speech in 1903 that ‘we should have a white Australia’ (he became Prime Minister in 1904). Forging a white Australia was a key political goal not only for him, however, but for European settlers in general over the centuries. The protests of the Aboriginal population also go back a long way. In 1938 a silent march was held to commemorate 150 years of land grabbing and colonization (creativespirits.info).

*Foley, Gary (1999): ATSIC: Flaws in the Machine. The Koori History Website.
*John Harris (2003): Hiding the Bodies: the myth of the humane colonisation of Australia. In: Aboriginal History Journal. Canberra: Australian Centre for Indigenous History, S. 79-104.
*Larissa Behrendt (2013): Indigenous Australia for Dummies. Canberra: International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, S. 53f. (Rezension)
*creativespirits.info: Aboriginal timeline: Protest.

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was a German composer, poet and writer. The quote comes from a speech before the Dresden Fatherland Association on the 15th of June, 1848. Amongst other things, he wrote the anti-Semitic book “Judaism and Music”.

Carl Friedrich Glasenapp (1905): Das Leben Richard Wagners in sechs Bänden. 2. Bd. 1843-1853. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, p. 460.

Even before the German Reich became a colonial power, enthusiasm for colonisation extended beyond the conservative circles which Richard Wagner frequented. Before Chancellor Bismarck invited the great European powers to Berlin in 1884 in order to divide up large parts of Africa between themselves, German princes and traders had had private colonies in Latin America, Africa and Asia. As early as 1683, a Kurbrandenburg colony was founded in present-day Ghana, a fortress that was an important settlement for Germans participating in the transatlantic slave trade. From 1528 to 1558, Venezuela was the “house colony” of the Welser banking house (Augsburg/Nuremberg). Other German merchants were also either involved in the slave trade or profited economically from it (Potts 1988: 18). After most of the colonies liberated themselves as a result of long struggles, colonial romanticism lived on in adventure novels and films (e.g., Out of Africa ​from 1985). Traces of these attitudes can also be found today in travel reports by young people from the Global North (glokal 2013).

*Farish Ahmad-Noor (2019): Why is Colonialism (Still) Romanticised? Ted Talk.
*David Spurr (1993): The Rhetoric of Empire. Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566) was a member of the Dominican Order and active as a bishop in the Spanish colonies in America. The Valladolid dispute (1550-1551) between de las Casas and the philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda dealt with the question of the legitimacy of the enslavement of the indigenous population of America. Sepúlveda represented the interests of Spanish landowners, de las Casas pointed out the violent acts of the Spaniards. The missing dates are 1494 and 1508, a period of 14 years.

Howard Zinn (1980): The People’s History of The United States. New York: Harper Collins.

In the first century of America’s occupation, the population decreased by approximately 75 million (95% in some areas) as a consequence of imported disease and murder (Federici 2009: 85f.). As early as the 1560s, there were resistance movements against the Spaniards. For example, members of the Taki Onqoy movement (1560-1572), which arose in what is now Peru, were opposed to any cooperation with the Europeans and advocated an alliance of Andean indigenous peoples to end European colonisation. They rejected Christianity and Christian names as well as food or other consignments from the Spaniards, they paid no tribute and did not work for the conquerors (Stern 1982: 50ff.).

*Steven J. Stern (1982): Peru‘s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest. Huamanga to 1640. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, S. 50ff.
*Silvia Federici (2009): Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia.

Chief Powhatan, 1545-1618, whose actual name was Wahunsenacawh, leader of the Algonquian-speaking Native Americans in what is now Virginia, where British colonists landed in the late 16th century.

Howard Zinn (1980/2003: 13).

The historian Howard Zinn wrote about how Native Americas in Virginia were initially friendly to European settlers, with some Europeans even living with them during a famine in 1610. However, Zinn also described violent retaliation on the part of the British: ‘When one of them [Native Americans] stole a small silver cup, Grenville [the leader of the British settlers] burned an entire village’ (Zinn 2003: 12). According to historian Edmund Morgan, the Europeans’ strategy was to exterminate the Native Americans. As the latter knew the area better and were difficult to make contact with, the English held sham peace negotiations, allowed the Native Americans to settle, and then killed as many as possible, burning their crops just before harvest (Morgan 2003: 100). Chief Powhatan’s brother Opechancanough led the resistance against the British.

*Glen Sean Coulthard (2014): Red Skin, White Masks. Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
*Edmund S. Morgan (1975/2003): American Slavery, American Freedom. New York: Norton.
*Howard Zinn (1980/2003): A People‘s History of the United States. 1492 – present. New York: Harper Collins.

Dr. Stefan Mair (geb. 1964) ist deutscher Ökonom und wird als Afrikaexperte bezeichnet. Er ist seit 2020 Direktor des Deutschen Instituts für Internationale Politik und Sicherheit, Executive Chairman of the Science and Politics Foundation (SWP), and member of the executive board of the Federation of German Industries (BDI).

Stefan Mair (2005): Ausbreitung des Kolonialismus.

The quote from the renowned “Africa expert” Mair reflects the endurance of colonial myths into the present. There are many counterexamples one can call up to discredit Mair’s reasoning:
colonial genocides (e.g. in modern-day Namibia) versus the reduction of the mortality rate during colonialism; the use of infrastructure for colonial resource and human exploitation versus the construction of infrastructure during colonialism; the destruction of previously existing, often non-capitalist forms of society or subsistence economy versus social and cultural change. Mair also describes loyalty to the nation as an abstract identity as preferable to other identities. In this way, he uncritically posits European concepts such as the nation as the norm, without naming the problems inherent in these concepts, e.g. nationalism and the resulting wars. The positive reference to ‘political and cultural change in the region’ indicates a positive understanding of colonisation as a civilising mission.

*Monitor (2017): G20-Gipfel: Wer profitiert vom „Marshall-Plan“ für Afrika?
*glokal (2016): Sustaining Inequality – The Neocolonial Politics of Development Education, North-South Volunteering and Fair Trade in Germany. In: darkmatter – in the ruins of imperial culture.

Moses Witbooi or ǀGâbeb ǃA-ǁîmab (c. 1807-1888) was a Nama captain in present-day Namibia. The quote is from a letter to the Ovaherero Captain Maharero ua Tjamuaha.

Heinrich Vedder (1931): Maharero und seine Zeit im Lichte der Dokumente seines Nachlasses. Windhoek: Veröffentlichungen der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft für S.W. Afrika. Band V., p. 18.

The Roman strategy of divide and rule was used by the Germans in Namibia to ensure they would not face a united anti-colonial army. The Witbooi family led the Nama in the resistance against German colonial power. The Nama were attacked by the Germans in 1893, in what became known as the Hornkranz Massacre, in which most of their women and children were slaughtered, while male warriors escaped. Henrik Witbooi, Moose’s son, then led a guerrilla war. After several attempts, which the exchange of letters also bears witness to, from 1904 onwards, the Herero and Nama united their forces in resistance. They then succumbed to the colonial power and were interned in camps where most of the remaining Nama and Herero perished. Overall, it is estimated that between 1904 and 1908, up to 70,000 Nama and Herero died in what was the first genocide of the 20th century (Jorgensen & Markusen 1999: 288).

*Reinhard Koesseler (2007): Genocide, Apology and Reparation – the linkage between images of the past in Namibia and Germany.
*is3w (2007): Altlasten – Namibias langer Weg in die Unabhängigkeit.
*Torben Jorgensen & Eric Markusen (1999): The Genocide of the Hereros. In: Israel W. Charny (Hrsg.): Encyclopedia of Genocide. Band 1, S. 288.

Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932) was a German social democrat and member of the SPD. This quote comes from a speech he made at the International Socialist Congress 1907.

Quoted by Karl Kautsky (1907): Sozialismus und Kolonialpolitik. Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts, p. 6.

While the Catholic Centre Party supported colonial policy, there were disagreements amongst Socialists. Unlike Bernstein, Karl Kautsky believed that socialism and colonialism were incompatible. Kautsky criticised Bernstein for expressly justifying a relationship of domination (Kautsky 1907: 17): the right of peoples of “higher” cultures to patronise peoples of “lesser” cultures. In the end of the congress, Bernstein only condemned ‘capitalist colonial policy,’ since it inevitably led to ‘forced labour and the annihilation of indigenous peoples,’ while socialism alone, he argued, could enable ‘peaceful cultural development.’ In his publication, Kautsky questioned the Europeans’ apparently civilising mission: ‘What do you need to educate and patronise other people?’ (ibid. p. 46).

*Karl Kautsky (1907): Sozialismus und Kolonialpolitik. Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts, p. 6.

Julius K. Nyerere (1922-1999) was the independence leader and later first President of Tanzania. This quote is from a speech he made to the UN about the Maji Maji War of 1905-07. The missing years are 1885, and then again 1885 and 1900.

Julius Nyerere (1966): Freedom and Unity (Uhuru na Umoja). A Selection from Writings and Speeches. 1952-1965. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 40 ff.

Nyerere was commemorating the Maji Maji Rebellion against German colonial rule in what was then German East Africa. This is considered one of Africa’s greatest colonial wars and was built on a broad alliance of different colonised groups. From the 1950s onwards, anti-colonial independence movements fought successfully across the continent: Libya became the first African colony to become independent in 1951, and most African countries followed in the next 25 years. From then on, however, the West employed strategies of economic subjugation (debt and tariff policies). David Budhoo, former IMF economist, wrote: ‘Everything we did from 1983 onward was based on our new sense of mission to have the south ‘privatized’ or die; towards this end we ignominiously created economic bedlam in
Latin America and Africa in 1983-88’ (quoted in Klein 2010: 239).

*Global Black History (2016): The Maji Maji Revolt in Tanzania 1905-1907.
*Naomi Klein (2007): The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada.

The General Act of the Berlin Conference of 1885, from which this quote comes, was the final document of a meeting that lasted more than 2 months. The German Empire, the USA, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Spain and Sweden-Norway took part in it. African representatives were not present.

Deutsches Reichsgesetzblatt (1885): Generalakte der Berliner Konferenz. Nr. 23, p. 225

In 1884, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck convened the Berlin Conference to lay the foundations for the division of Africa for trade and into colonies. The standards defined in the conference’s document, which European powers portrayed as guaranteeing protection for Africans, were violated in all colonies: oppression, violence and arbitrariness were the norm for the colonised (Zimmerer 2021). Shortly after the conference, nearly the entire African continent was divided between seven European countries. In 1914, half of the earth’s surface and a third of the world’s population was living under colonial rule (Bertelsmann Universal-Lexikon 2006: 496). Bismarck is treated as a “cautious colonial politician” in historiography (see Bpb 2015). However, this is not because he was against subjugating and exploiting other peoples, but because for him, the costs outweighed the benefits (ibid.).

*Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (2015): Bismarck und der Kolonialismus.
*DW.com (17.10.2016): Recognising Germany’s Colonial Crimes: Work in Progress.

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.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a British novelist and author of The Jungle Book.

Rudyard Kipling (1899): “The White Man’s Burden”, first published in McClure’s Magazine on 12.02.1899.

“The White Man’s Burden” expresses the colonial sense of mission, which first emerged before the end of the 19th century when Kipling wrote the poem. European colonisation and Christian missions had been justified as civilising missions for centuries before that (Teno 2004). Shortly after Kipling published his work, a satire appeared, a poem called The Brown Man’s Burden by the British Henry du Pré Labouchère. In it, the poet wrote that colonialism was not a civilising mission and did not have a positive impact on the lives of the colonised, but instead constituted imperialist domination of others: ‘The brown man’s loss must ever. Imply the white man’s gain. (…) Let all your manifestoes. Reek with philanthropy. And if with heathen folly. He [the brown man] dares your will dispute. Then, in the name of freedom. Don’t hesitate to shoot.’

*Henry Labouchère (1899): The Brown Man’s Burden. London: Truth.

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

This text comes from the draft of the colonial blood protection law of the German National Socialists (undated, approx. 1940), Bundesarchiv- Koblenz, R 22/2365.

Kum’a Ndumbe III. (1993): Was wollte Hitler in Afrika? NS-Planungen für eine faschistische Neugestaltung Afrikas. Frankfurt: IKO, p. 270f.

After the First World War, the German Reich was stripped of all its colonies by the Treaty of Versailles. Because of its ‘cruel oppression’ and ‘forced labour’, Germany had failed ‘in the field of colonial civilization’ (Gründer 2012: 258). Although at first Hitler wanted to conquer “living space in the East”, there had always been colonial efforts in Asia and Africa, especially after the end of 1937. The interest in colonial conquest was nurtured especially ‘in the Foreign Office and the Navy, and not least, in private companies, at the forefront of the latter, the Berlin and Hanseatic shipping and trading companies, but also [at] Deutsche[n] Bank’ (Linne 2008). In December 1940, the Axis powers divided the world between themselves: ‘Germany and Italy were to dominate “neighbouring” Africa and the Near and Middle East, while Southeast Asia and Oceania were left to Japan’ (Rheinisches JouralistenInnenbüro & recherche international 2008: 43).

*Rheinisches JournalistInnenbüro (2008): URL: Die Dritte Welt im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Unterrichtsmaterialien zu einem vergessenen Kapitel der Geschichte.
*Karsten Linne im Interview (2008): Die NS-Kolonialplanungen für Afrika.
*Horst Gründer (2012): Geschichte der deutschen Kolonien. Paderborn: Schöningh.

Toussaint Louverture (1743-1803) was a formerly enslaved Haitian who led the resistance against France. These lines come from a letter Louverture wrote to Napoleon, to which he attached this constitutional text.

Constitution of Haiti (1801)

It began in 1791 with an uprising of 50,000 people: Haitians, most of whom were enslaved, fighting for their independence from France. In 1794, slavery was abolished. With the war of independence dragging on for several years, Napoleon threatened to reintroduce slavery. But the Haitians won and became the first Latin American country to become independent in 1804. However, a coalition of European states and the United States boycotted the country. Since the prosperity of colonial states was based on the plantation economy and therefore on the principle of slavery, they feared that the Haitian revolution could also inspire other oppressed peoples. As a result, Haiti was forced into isolation in terms of foreign policy and the new state was obliged to make vast compensation payments to former slave owners. In return for recognising Haiti as an independent state in 1825, France demanded compensation of 150 million francs. It was not until 1883 that Haiti was finally able to pay off this amount which it did with the help of loans (Ziegler 2010). The high national debt it was saddled with immediately after independence is often seen as marking the start of Haiti’s economic dependence on the outside world. At the World Conference Against Racism in 2001, Haiti demanded compensation from France.

*Project in Haiti and the Domenican Republic where Youth work on the history of slavery and liberation.
*Jean Ziegler (2010): Haiti und der Hass auf den Westen. In Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik.

From the Declaration of Independence of the Philippines.

Ambrosio Rianzares Bautista (1898): Declaration of Independence.

The Philippines was a Spanish colony from 1571 until, as an outcome of anti-colonial liberation struggle, it declared independence in 1898. At the time, however, the USA wanted to incorporate the islands, and a fifth of the population lost their lives in the ensuing Philippine-American War of 1899 to 1902. The islands then became a US colony until 1942 when they were occupied by Japanese troops. The left-wing anti-Japanese People’s Liberation Army was then formed, a partisan movement made up of 30,000 fighters and 70,000 reservists. They collaborated with the US against the Japanese, but opposed US colonial rule. According to writer Ricardo Trota Jose, 80% of Filippin@s were in the resistance or supported it: ‘One million Filipinos fought in various guerrilla movements’ (RJB & recherche international 2008: 132). Although the Philippines gained independence in 1946, a US-friendly government was then installed. It was only in 1990, under President Corazon Aquino, that the resistance fighters were finally recognised as such (ibid.: 100f.).

*Rheinisches JournalistInnenbüro & recherche international (2008): Die Dritte Welt im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Unterrichtsmaterialien zu einem vergessenen Kapitel der Geschichte. Köln.

Lucía Muriel is a psychologist, activist and networker in Berlin who works to ensure that global justice is understood in a way that is decolonial critical of racism.

move global (2017): Versuch eines Paradigmenwechsels, p. 17.

The colonial power to define black and white discourses, politics, culture and the body was denounced by the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), who advocated decolonisation at several levels. Decolonisation means recognising, challenging and overcoming colonial patterns. It refers not only to the independence of formerly colonised states, but also to social, cultural and individual dimensions of colonisation, e.g. not letting majority society dictate what migration means for a migrant, as Lucía Muriel makes clear in this quote. Decolonisation means empowerment and liberation from domination.

*Ismahan Wayah (2017): Wir schreiben Geschichte. In: glokal: Connecting the Dots. Lernen aus Geschichte(n) zu Unterdrückung und Widerstand. S. 10.
*Raykamal Kahlon (2017): Du hast gesagt, es würde nicht wehtun. Verkörperte Pädagogik. In: glokal: Connecting the Dots. Lernen aus Geschichte(n) zu Unterdrückung und Widerstand. S. 82.

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.

Toypurina, 1760-1799, was a Tongva/Gabrieliño medic and leader of a rebellion against Spanish missionaries in what is now California.

Thomas Workman Temple II (1958): Toypurina the Witch and the Indian Uprising at San Gabriel,’’ Masterkey 32, no. 5: 136–52.

Toypurina led a rebellion against the San Gabriel Mission in California. The missionaries under Junipero Serra pioneered the Spanish colonisation of California. Serra was canonised in 2015. Across the Americas, indigenous peoples were stripped of their lands by European colonisers or, post-independence, by the countries’ non-indigenous elites. In Argentina, which is almost 8 times the size of Germany, the southern half of the country was independent indigenous territory until the late 19th century. From 1878-1885, the brutal military Conquista del Desierto was carried out. After the sell-off and privatisation of the land that followed, only 12,500 hectares of territory remain today (1 ha ≈ 1 football field). The largest landowner since the land privatisation campaign under neoliberal President Carlos Menem in the 1990s is the Italian fashion group Benetton. A law passed in 2011 by the Cristina Kirchner government (2007-2015) to prevent land sales to foreign companies – but not to Argentine ones – was reversed by President Mauricio Macri (2015-2019).

*Suppressed Histories: The holy woman Toypurina
*Indian Country Today Media Network: Junipero Serra as Indian Killer
*Petition: Urge Pope Francis to abandon the canonization of Junipero Serra 
*Eduardo Galeano (1997): Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. New York. Monthly Review Press.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher, economist and journalist, and co-founder of the First International (International Workingmen’s Association). His main work Das Kapital is one of the most important books for the international labour movement.

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (1960): Werke. Band 9. Berlin/DDR: Dietz, p. 221.

Even Karl Marx, who fought for the liberation and empowerment of the European proletariat, submitted to the European ideology of supremacy. Nonetheless, his ideas and theories inspired movements in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America to throw off colonial or bourgeois rule, and were still prominent during the First World War (starting with the Russian October Revolution of 1917). However, the newly created systems were by no means free from domination. There were also mass communist movements in England, Spain, Italy and Germany, as well as, for a short period, Soviet republics (Räterepubliken) in Bremen, Leipzig and Munich. Many theorists and activists in Third World liberation movements referred to Marx, e.g. Walter Rodney from Guyana or Fidel Castro in Cuba and Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana. There was also a strong Marxist movement in India. Intellectuals still invoke Marxism today, e.g. the historian Vijay Prashad (author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (2007)) or the literary scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Can the Subaltern Speak (1988)).

*Vijay Prashad (2007): The Darker Nations. A People‘s History of the Third World. New York: The New Press.
*The Times of India (2018): “Marxism Should be Re-imagined”: Spivak.

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.

Tupac Katari (1750-1781) was an Aymara leader in the rebellion against Spanish colonisers in present-day Bolivia. He took the names of earlier resistance fighters (Tomás Katari and Túpac Amaru) who were killed by the Spanish in 1572.

Quoted by Thomas Guthmann (2017): Körper im Zeichen des Zeitstrahls. In glokal: Connecting the Dots. Lernen aus Geschichte(n) zu Unterdrückung und Widerstand, p. 98

Tupac Katari assembled an army of 40,000 fighters and besieged La Paz. His wife, Bartolina Sisa, commanded the siege and played an important role after Katari’s capture. However, the overthrow of European colonialism in most Latin American countries in the 19th century did not mean that free and equal societies could develop. This was because the formal end of European colonialism did not mean the end of power relations. New hierarchies were created, and the distribution of wealth in many countries was tied to class, race and gender. Aníbal Quijano argued that global capitalism replaced colonialism as the system of domination and that the main beneficiaries of this system continued to be Europeans and their descendants in other countries (Quijano 2007: 168). Tupac Katari’s remarks were taken up again in 2003 when the people of Bolivia opposed the sell off of their natural gas. ‘When neoliberal President Sanchez de Lozada was ousted from the presidency, the slogan echoed through the streets of El Alto’ (Guthmann 2017: 98). Former Bolivian President Evo Morales also sees himself as an inheritor of Tupac Katari’s tradition of resistance (Morales’ inaugural speech reported in the New York Times, 23 January, 2006).

*Thomas Guthmann (2017): Körper im Zeichen des Zeitstrahls. In glokal: Connecting the Dots. Lernen aus Geschichte(n) zu Unterdrückung und Widerstand.
*Anibal Quihano (2007): Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality, Cultural Studies 21 (2-3); 168-178.
**The New York Times (23.01.2006): “Bolivia Indians Hail the Swearing In of One of Their Own as President.”