UNSILENCED.A Documentary Archive

IXVisual Archive

The Pictures They Filed Away

Photographs and documents from the long century of conquest. Each image is a deposition. Look at them in sequence and the argument makes itself.

Mutilated Congolese children — Congo Free State, c.1904 — children whose hands were severed by Force Publique soldiers under Leopold II's quota system.Source — Congo · 1904

Nsala of Wala — Nsala of Wala looks at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter Boali, killed when the village failed to meet its rubber quota.Source — Congo · 1904

Chicotte punishment — Punishment by the chicotte — a whip of hippopotamus hide — was standard Belgian discipline in the rubber-producing zones.Source — Congo · c.1900

Diagram of the slave ship Brookes — The Brookes diagram, 1788. Used by abolitionists to show how 482 human beings were packed into a single voyage.Source — Atlantic · 1788

Haitian Revolution scene — Saint-Domingue in revolt. The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) was the only successful slave uprising to found a nation; France punished it for the next 122 years.Source — Haiti · 1791

Bartolomé de las Casas — Bartolomé de las Casas. His Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 1552, remains one of the earliest published indictments of European cruelty in the Americas.Source — Americas · 1552

Trail of Tears painting — The Trail of Tears. The forced removal of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw nations under U.S. federal law. Thousands died on the march.Source — USA · 1830s

Truganini — Truganini (c.1812–1876), often called — incorrectly — the 'last' Tasmanian Aboriginal. The genocide of her people was carried out within living memory of Victorian Britain.Source — Tasmania · 19th c.

Herero survivors — Herero survivors of the German extermination order of 1904. The first concentration camps of the twentieth century were built here, in present-day Namibia.Source — Namibia · 1904

Herero prisoners — Herero prisoners in chains. German colonial methods were studied closely by the next generation of European militarists.Source — Namibia · 1907

Bengal famine — Calcutta, 1943. Three million Bengalis died while grain continued to be exported under British wartime policy.Source — India · 1943

British Empire map — Imperial Federation Map of the World, 1886. The pink covers roughly a quarter of the earth's land surface.Source — Britain · 1886

Banda Islands — The Banda Islands, Indonesia. In 1621 the Dutch East India Company massacred or enslaved nearly the entire population to monopolise the nutmeg trade.Source — Indonesia · 1621

Algiers — Algiers under French occupation. The war for Algerian independence (1954–1962) cost between 300,000 and 1.5 million Algerian lives.Source — Algeria · 20th c.

Frantz Fanon — Frantz Fanon (1925–1961). Psychiatrist and theorist of decolonisation; author of The Wretched of the Earth.Source — Theory

Edward Said — Edward Said (1935–2003). His Orientalism (1978) reshaped how the West's gaze on the East could be analysed and criticised.Source — Theory

IMF headquarters — The International Monetary Fund, Washington D.C. Its 'structural adjustment' programmes have repeatedly forced poorer countries to gut social spending.Source — Today

Lagos skyline — Lagos, Nigeria — the largest city in Africa. Rarely the image Western media reaches for when illustrating the continent.Source — Today

India Mars mission — India's Mars Orbiter Mission, 2014. India reached Mars on its first attempt, for less than the budget of a Hollywood film.Source — Today

The Obamas — The Obamas, 2012. The first Black U.S. presidency triggered the largest organised resurgence of open white-nationalist politics in a generation.Source — USA · 2012

Textbooks — School textbooks. In most former colonial powers, the empire is taught — when it is taught at all — as a story of administration, ports, and railways.Source — Education

References

Sources & Further Reading

[1]Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division — loc.gov/pictures.
[2]Wikimedia Commons — public-domain colonial and civil-rights era photography.
[3]National Archives (UK) and US National Archives and Records Administration.
[4]Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, nmaahc.si.edu.

All works cited in good faith for documentary, educational and critical use. Errors and omissions: contact the archive.