Petina Gappah Quotes

When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.

Colonial governors and senior civil servants are not easy people to argue with, and I was not popular because of my criticism of the colonial service in Kenya.

I went to study at Oxford University in the 1980s on an imperial scholarship instituted by Cecil Rhodes.

In handing over to the government of India to these so-called political classes [The Indian Congress Party], we are handing over to men of straw of whom in a few years no trace will remain.

Our practical success in preserving order, securing justice and developing the material resources of many of our colonies is largely due to the fact that we have learnt to employ native agents wherever possible for detailed work of administration, and to adapt our government, where it can be safely done, to native conditions.

We had the highest standard of health and education and housing for our black people than any other country on the African continent. That was what Rhodesians did. I wonder if we shouldn't be given credit for doing that.

The main purpose of stationing a large body of troops in America will be to secure the dependence of the colonies on Great Britain

The United States is unused to Colonial rule and lacks a trained body of colonial administrators and civil servants.

Some time ago, the United States was an English colony. If an Englishman were asked if the United States would be independent, he would have said no, that it would always be an English colony.

The Canadian risings of the 1830s obliged the men in London to think much harder about settler self-government.

I am the last Englishman to rule in India.

His Majesty’s possessions in North America are so many times more extensive than the Islands of Great Britain, that if they were equally well inhabited, Great Britain could no longer maintain her dominion over them. It is therefore evidently her Policy to set bounds to the increment of People, and to the extent of the settlement of that Country.

The outlook is rather that within a few years India will be given up as Egypt has been given up. The British democracy will not try to retain her by force. Of that we may be sure. The enormous benefits that England has conferred on the country and its swarming millions will count for nothing in retaining their allegiance. The jealousies, rivalries and hatreds of race and creed among the many different peoples, though they may make trouble enough hereafter, have not proved capable of preventing them from combining against their British masters.

Free Englishmen had independently settled North America in precisely the same their Saxon ancestors … had possessed themselves of the island of Britain.

The people of Ireland are ready to become a portion of the [British] Empire, provided that they be made so in reality, and not in name alone.

Overall, for 99 years, the planet grew more peaceful and prosperous under Britain’s eye.

We have a problem in Africa with our education system. It is a relic from the past. The education system was meant to create clerks to help the administrative role of the colonial power. So the emphasis was on neat handwriting and how to write good reports and things like that, and if you move further, then you study Shakespeare and Molière. But we don’t have enough engineers and scientists. Two percent of African university graduates study agriculture, when 70 percent of our people are living off the land. Obviously, we have a problem.

Royal African Company

He that shall take an oath untruely, or bear false wittness in any cause or against any man whatsoever, shall be punished with death.

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.

The 1857 uprising in India did not free the subcontinent, but it changed the way the British viewed and sought to govern it.

The British especially have no excuse for forgetting that empire is a most complex and persistent beast. And it has claws.

Postcolonial critics are, I suspect, wrong when they argue that the mass of British people still mourn the loss of empire. But Britain's politicians - and its Foreign Office - have found it hard to adjust to the loss, not so much of onetime colonies as of the global clout the colonies once afforded.

Being a white southern African who saw the transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, the sense of being an outsider was absolutely instilled in my limbic system.

At issue when professional sports teams take the name of Native Americans is the problem of mimicry: having appropriated the land and wealth of America's vanquished peoples, settler culture then appropriates the supposed values and spirit of the vanquished as well.