What We Can Do
The architecture of empire was not built in a day, and it will not come down in one. It can come down. It has come down before. It requires the steady, unglamorous practice of refusal.
This is the page that, on most websites about historical injustice, becomes a list of slogans. We have tried to make it something else. The recommendations below are deliberately small, deliberately concrete, and deliberately addressed to different positions in the system. If you find none of them apply to you, you are probably not looking carefully enough.
As an individual
- →Read writers from the countries your country has harmed. Start with Fanon, Said, Rodney, Davis, Cabral, Galeano, Achebe, Adichie, Olusoga.
- →When you find yourself surprised that a person from a Global South country is excellent at their job — interrogate the surprise. It is the racism speaking.
- →Stop using 'developing' and 'developed' uncritically. The honest words are 'over-exploited' and 'over-exploiting.'
- →Refuse the charity frame. Solidarity is not pity. The person you are 'helping' is not a project.
- →Support repatriation of looted objects in your local museum. Write to the curators. Make it expensive to keep them.
As a parent or teacher
- →Find out what the official curriculum skips. Teach it anyway.
- →Replace 'discovery' with 'invasion.' Replace 'civilizing mission' with 'extraction regime.' Words decide what is thinkable.
- →Make sure the heroes in your house and your classroom are not all from the same continent.
- →Take children to the parts of your city's history that the official tour skips — the docks, the warehouses, the streets named after slavers.
As a worker or institution
- →Find out where your employer's founding capital came from. Most pre-1900 European and American institutions of any size have a slavery or colonial chapter. Ask publicly.
- →Push for hiring, promotion and supplier-diversity practices that survive contact with reality, not just HR slide decks.
- →If you work in publishing, media, academia or culture: stop asking writers from the Global South to explain their existence to a Western audience. Pay them to write what they want to write.
- →If you work in finance, ask why your firm's risk models systematically downgrade entire countries.
As a citizen of a former colonial power
- →Support political parties and candidates that take reparations, debt cancellation, and the return of looted objects seriously. Make it an issue at elections.
- →Support visa and asylum policies that do not treat people from formerly colonized countries as a security threat by default.
- →Refuse the argument that your country 'cannot afford' reparations. Your country can afford whatever it decides is a priority. Wars, bank bailouts, monarchies and Olympic Games all happen on the same budget.
- →Tell the truth about your own history out loud, in public, repeatedly, even when it is unwelcome — especially when it is unwelcome.
As a citizen of a formerly colonized country
- →Refuse the framing that your country must prove itself to a Western audience to be considered modern. You owe them no audition.
- →Support local writers, local archives, local universities, local journalism. The cultural memory cannot be outsourced.
- →Build economic relationships horizontally — South to South — that do not run through Northern intermediaries.
- →Demand the return of what was taken. Loudly. Patiently. Without apology.
A call to our white Western friends.
This page is written to you, specifically. Not to attack you. To recruit you.
If you are white, and Western, and you have made it this far into the archive without closing the tab, you are already not the problem we are most worried about. The people we need you to reach are the ones who would have closed it on page one — your father at dinner, your colleague on Slack, the uncle at the wedding, the friend who is "just asking questions," the well-meaning liberal who agrees in principle and changes the subject in practice. That conversation is yours. We cannot have it for you, and a stranger from Lagos or Lahore cannot have it for you either. The messenger matters.
What actually works
- 01
Lead with their values, not yours.
If they care about the rule of law, talk about treaties broken. If they care about free markets, talk about extraction, tariffs, and stolen patents. If they care about family, talk about families separated by partition, by deportation, by the slave ship. Meet them where their conscience already lives.
- 02
Use their own history.
The Irish under the British. The Boers in British camps. The Highland Clearances. The Holocaust. Most Western families have, somewhere, been on the receiving end of an empire. Find that thread and pull on it before asking them to see anyone else's.
- 03
Refuse the word 'guilt'.
Guilt is a trap. It freezes people, and a frozen person changes nothing. Talk about responsibility instead — what one does next, not what one feels now. Nobody alive today started the Atlantic slave trade. Everybody alive today decides whether it keeps paying dividends.
- 04
Name one specific fact, not a worldview.
'The British took £45 trillion out of India between 1765 and 1938' is harder to dismiss than 'colonialism was bad.' One concrete number, one verifiable atrocity, one quotable line from a colonial official — that does more work than an hour of abstraction.
- 05
Don't argue to win. Argue to plant.
Most people do not change their minds in the conversation. They change them three weeks later, alone, when the fact you mentioned will not leave them alone. Plant the fact. Walk away. Let it grow.
- 06
Refuse the 'but what about' detour.
'But what about African slave traders / Arab slavers / tribal warfare / Mugabe?' These are not arguments; they are exits. Answer once, briefly, honestly — yes, those happened, and none of them built the global order we live inside today — and return to the original point. Do not let the conversation be steered into a maze.
- 07
Name the present, not just the past.
Most resistance collapses the moment empire is filed under 'history.' Bring it forward: the CFA franc this year, the Chagossians this year, the cobalt in their phone this year, the IMF conditionalities this year. The past is easier to admit when it is not over.
- 08
Use the mirror, gently.
Ask: 'If a foreign power did to your country what your country did to theirs, for three hundred years, what would you be owed?' Most people answer honestly when the question is turned around. Then sit with the answer.
- 09
Refuse the comfort of exception.
'My family came after.' 'My ancestors were poor too.' 'I personally did nothing.' All true, all irrelevant to whether the wealth, the institutions, the borders, and the passport you inherited were built on someone else's bones. Inheritance does not require participation.
- 10
Be patient with the slow ones. Not with the cruel ones.
Distinguish the person who is uninformed from the person who knows and enjoys it. The first deserves a long conversation. The second deserves a short one and a closed door.
What does not work
- ✕Calling them racist in the opening sentence. Even when accurate, it ends the conversation before it begins.
- ✕Performing your own enlightenment. They can smell it, and it makes you the subject of the conversation instead of the history.
- ✕Sharing a 90-minute documentary. Send a paragraph. They will read a paragraph.
- ✕Arguing on their preferred platform at their preferred volume. The comment section is not where minds move.
- ✕Demanding apology before discussion. Apology is the end of the road, not the entrance.
A note on courage
The cost of speaking is real. You will lose dinner invitations. A WhatsApp group will go quiet. A colleague will start cc'ing your manager. This is a small tax compared with what the people in these pages paid, and continue to pay, for being born on the wrong side of a border drawn by someone who never visited. Pay it anyway. The people most useful to empire have always been the ones who agreed in private and stayed quiet in public.
You are not asked to be heroic. You are asked to stop being convenient.
Take it further
A weekly cadence — small enough to keep, big enough to count
01 —
One fact, one room
Each week, drop one concrete, sourced fact from this archive into one conversation where it does not belong. The dinner table. The group chat. The team standup. Plant and walk away.
02 —
One pound, one cause
Set up a small standing order — £5, €5, $5 a month — to a frontline group: Survival International, the Chagossian Voices, Forensic Architecture, the Equal Justice Initiative, a local Indigenous land trust. The amount is symbolic. The standing order is not.
03 —
One letter, one museum
Once a quarter, write to one trustee, MP, museum board or university chancellor about one specific looted object, one named historical claim, one ongoing extraction. Real post, signed name. The volume of mail on these files is currently almost nothing — your single letter moves the dial more than you think.
A closing note.
A site like this can only do one thing: make it harder to keep pretending. It cannot raise the dead. It cannot return the stolen libraries. It cannot uncut the severed hands of the Congo or unstarve the children of Bengal. What it can do is stand in the way of the next polite, well-funded, museum-quality version of forgetting.
The descendants of empire do not need to feel guilty. Guilt is a private emotion and a poor substitute for action. What they need to do is account, repair, and step aside from the long habit of considering themselves the protagonist of everyone else's story.
The rest of the world has been waiting a very long time for the conversation to finally start on honest terms. It is starting. Slowly. Now.
Thank you for reading the whole archive. Now share it.
Begin again from the top.
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Last updated 23 June 2026Submit a correctionMethodology
References
Sources & Further Reading
- [1]Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (François Maspero, 1961; English: Grove, 1963).
- [2]Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (Présence Africaine, 1955; English: Monthly Review, 1972).
- [3]Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Crossing Press, 1984).
- [4]CARICOM Reparations Commission, Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice (2014).
- [5]Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (Pluto, 2020).
- [6]Felwine Sarr & Bénédicte Savoy, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage (report commissioned by President Macron, November 2018).
All works cited in good faith for documentary, educational and critical use. Errors and omissions: contact the archive.