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 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.
← Return to the ManifestoReferences
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.