Language Decolonisation and the Radio

Approaches to language decolonisation vary but are all actions taken "to undo the social, political, and cultural effects of dominance of colonial languages" and to fight against language shift, endangerment, extinction and death. Languages and identities suppressed by linguistic imperialism are legitimated, revitalised, and maintained, linguistic inequality, manipulation, repression and cultural oppression are redressed.

Media is a strong tool for language decolonisation. In Ghana, for instance, radio record most of the programmes in Ghanaian languages. Mass media becomes "a mechanism for the storage of expressions, reservoirs and reference points for the circulation of words, phrases and discourse".

Linguistically, African language programmes on radio and TV have immensely contributed in African societies. Listeners learn a lot of things on language such as new vocabularies for modern concepts in politics, medicine, health, education, administration, economics and science from African programmes. They get new terms, idiomatic expressions, etymologies of words, proverbs, archaisms, appellations, etc. of indigenous languages (see Agyekum 2010 on radio). 

One of the major functions of the African language programmes on radio and TV talk-shows is language modernization, development and elaboration of terms to cater for most aspects of human life. Radio is one of the most powerful tools in the dissemination, interpretation and recontextualisation of discourse (see Agyekum 2000, 2010). Coined terms and phrases commonly used on African language radio programmes are picked up by the people and accepted for use outside radio.

Oral literature genres are less available in urban spaces and appear more and more on radio which somewhat replaces the "traditional village oral traditions" once provided by the elders. Both radio and television become repositories for African languages particularly when it comes to orality which was the main feature of African laguages before the advent of missionaries (Agyekum, 2018).

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-- Agyekum, K. (2018). Linguistic imperialism and language decolonisaiton in Africa through documentation and preservation. In J. Kandybowicz, T. Major, H. Torrence and P. Duncan (eds.) African Linguistics on the Prairie: Selected papers from the 45th annual conference on African linguistics. Berlin: Language Science Press, pp. 87–104.

- photograph by Pierre Verger via

The intention of decolonising museums is not ...

 ... "to erase history, or the history of the object, but to work collaboratively with communities to develop multiple perspectives to support a better understanding and deeper meaning. Decolonising the collection will mean that we have more information about objects, not less. We will be able to present a more balanced, authentic and decolonised account of history."
Comms team response to blog comment, 2022

photograph by Inge Morath (Museum Hamburger Bahnhof, Saachi Collection Show, Berlin, 1998) via

Sory Sanlé and the "People of the Night"

"Photography is a witness to everything, a kind of proof of life. When I started out, my nation was a French colony. A few months after, in 1958, we became an independent colony. Two years later, we were fully independent. Haute-Volta, as the country was known before 1983, flourished after independence, and the region experienced its own nouvelle vague."
Sory Sanlé

"There were only a few photographers working in Haute-Volta at the time. Most were in Ouagadougou, the capital. I was one of the first in Bobo, and the first to use the name Volta. People were excited about the possibilities independence offered and played with new identities in the studio."
Sory Sanlé

Sory Sanlé is a Burkinabe photographer, born in 1943, who developed "a reputation as photographer of the Burkinabe club scene in the 1960s and 70s" (via). Burkina Faso's club scene was vibrant in the years after the independence from France, bands played to "stylish crowds riding a wave of liberation". And Sanlé captured it all. (via)

“It was a pleasure to show the joy of those people. People loved each other and there was so much fun. … They might have been poor but they had a ball and enjoyed those moments.”
Sory Sanlé

“It did not matter what anyone’s position was,” says Sory. “People would always mingle, interact and take care of each other — not like today.”
Sory Sanlé

photographs via and via and via 

The first object of the coloniser...

 "...is to plant deep in the minds of the native population the idea that before the advent of colonialism their history was one which was dominated by barbarism."
Frantz Fanon

photograph via

Statement by King Willem-Alexander at the beginning of the state visit to Indonesia

Mr President,
It is a great honour for my wife and me to be your guests. In recent years we have got to know each other well. We see this state visit as an affirmation of the close bond that has grown between us. And we look forward to making the bond with you and your country even stronger. (...)



Mr President, on 17 August it will be 75 years since Indonesia issued its Proklamasi, claiming its place among independent and free states. The Dutch government explicitly acknowledged this fact, both politically and morally, 15 years ago.
Today we warmly congratulate the people of Indonesia as you celebrate 75 years of independence.
We are looking forward to the coming days. Our visit has a wonderful, future-oriented programme.
At the same time, it is a good thing that we continue to face up to our past. The past cannot be erased, and will have to be acknowledged by each generation in turn.
In the years immediately after the Proklamasi, a painful separation followed that cost many lives.
In line with earlier statements by my government, I would like to express my regret and apologise for excessive violence on the part of the Dutch in those years. I do so in the full realisation that the pain and sorrow of the families affected continue to be felt today.
It is a hopeful and encouraging sign that countries which were once on opposite sides have been able to grow closer and develop a new relationship based on respect, trust and friendship. The ties between us are becoming ever stronger and more diverse. That gives me great pleasure. And I know that this feeling is widely shared in the Netherlands.
Many people in the Netherlands feel a deep connection with Indonesia. It’s gratifying that, in turn, a growing number of young Indonesians are showing interest in our country.
We see that in the number of young men and women who come to the Netherlands to study. We see it above all in the close working relationships between our two countries in the fields of science, the economy, water management, nature protection and climate. (...)

Royal House of the Netherlands

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photograph via

Dutch Masters Revisited

Museums in the Netherlands have started ditching historical terms and adding portraits of black people to what was formerly "a sea of all white and mostly male faces" in order to "promote inclusion and social equity". Amsterdam Museum will no longer use the term "Dutch Golden Age" (via) to describe the Dutch Republic, a world power in the 17th century with a prosperous economy, and "a flourishing of art, culture and intellectual thought", a term that also "losses over the ugly realities of Dutch ascendancy" such as the involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade - about 600.000 enslaved Africans were traded by the Dutch (via).



“The Western Golden Age occupies an important place in Western historiography that is strongly linked to national pride, but positive associations with the term such as prosperity, peace, opulence, and innocence do not cover the charge of historical reality in this period. The term ignores the many negative sides of the 17th century such as poverty, war, forced labor, and human trafficking.”
Tom van der Molen

"We will continue to work with people in the city to uncover underexposed stories and perspectives of our shared history.”
Daniel Boffey

“We believe that the Golden Age is, in a way, the story of the winners, and it hides the colonial past of the country. It hides slavery, but also it covers up poverty more generally. Not everyone participated in the Golden Age, not at all.”
Margriet Schavemaker

“If you want to protect an open and democratic system, it will mean that you have to promote greater inclusion of what you understand as ‘Dutch,’” and that means telling new stories, and coming up with new terminologies. There is an implicit hierarchy built into many of the Dutch cultural institutions, and that has to be made explicit.”
Karwan Fatah-Black

“If you talk about the Golden Age, people think they know what that story is about. What we forget to tell is that it was only about 1 percent of society. People in Holland were stricken by poverty, there were internal wars going on, and on top of that there was slavery as well. The people in the Netherlands today are not just descendants of that 1 percent; they’re descendants of the 99 percent as well.”
Jörgen Tjon A. Fong

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photograph by Sandra Lousada (Rothko exhibition, 1961) via

The -ism Series (33): Nuclear Colonialism

"Nuclear colonialism is a system of domination through which governments and corporations disproportionately target and devastate indigenous peoples and their lands to maintain the nuclear production process."
Danielle Endres



Nuclear colonialism refers to a system that targets indigenous peoples in order to maintain the nuclear production process. Rhetorically, it "excludes American Indians and their opposition to it". A large part of the world's nuclear industry is sited on Native lands or their surroundings, i.e., reservation and sacred lands threatening the people's health and cultural survival, poisoning their environment. In the U.S., about 70% of uranium mining takes place on Native lands. Between 1951 and 1992 alone, "over 900 nuclear weapons tests were conducted on the Nevada Test Site (NTS) land claimed by the Western Shoshone under the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley" exposing Indigenous people to radiation again and again. From the exploration to the dumping of radioactive waste, each step contributes to the genocide and ethnocide of Indigenous peoples (via).

American Indian resistance is an important part of the story of nuclear colonialism. Despite the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act's limitations, American Indian activists were instrumental in getting it passed.
Danielle Endres

Black US-Americans are also excluded in the rhetoric:

Well before Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke out against nuclear weapons, African Americans were protesting the Bomb. Historians have generally ignored African Americans when studying the anti-nuclear movement, yet they were some of the first citizens to protest Truman's decision to drop atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
(...) from early on, blacks in America saw the use of atomic bombs as a racial issue, asking why such enormous resources were being spent building nuclear arms instead of being used to improve impoverished communities. Black activists' fears that race played a role in the decision to deploy atomic bombs only increased when the U.S. threatened to use nuclear weapons in Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam a decade later. (...) the nuclear issue was connected to colonialism: the U.S. obtained uranium from the Belgian controlled Congo and the French tested their nuclear weapons in the Sahara. (via)

"Atomic ballet" with a (stemless) mushroom cloud at Upshot-Knothole Dixie of Operation Upshot-Knothole. The photographs of ballet dancer Sally McCloskey were taken by photographer Donald English on 6 April 1953

Sometimes we would cover it from Angel’s Peak, take pictures of the mushroom cloud. Sometimes we’’d take dancers up to the top of the peak. I’’d have one girl, Sally McCloskey, we did a little series that was called Angel’’s Dance. And she was a ballet dancer, not a showgirl, and she did an interpretive dance to the mushroom cloud as it came up and we shot a series of pictures and sent it out on the wire and they called it Angel’’s Dance. We just did anything we could to make the picture a little bit different because the newspapers would run the mushroom cloud pictures, but they were always hungry for anything that had any kind of a different approach.
Donald English

- - - - - - - - - -
- Endres, D. (2016). The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 6(1), 39-60, LINK
- Schwartz, J. A. (2016). Matters of Empathy and Nuclear Colonialism: Marshallese Voices Marked in Story, Song, and Illustration. Music & Politics, X(2), LINK
- photographs of nuclear dancer via and via and via

Sunday Music and Jovanotti's Appeal to the Prime Minister

Lorenzo Cherubini, known as Jovanotti, is a popular Italian singer and songwriter. In a rap song, he urged then Prime Minister D'Alema to cancel the debts of developing countries, of countries that had been colonised and then left alone drowning in the so-called progress the colonisers had brought. That was back in 2000. Jovanotti pointed out that one billion people had less than one dollar a day to survive, that their poverty was not their choice and had an impact on their health, education, and future in general (via). D'Alema agreed to act and, for instance, write off Mozambique's debt to Italy (via).



Mezzogiorno, a lovely song (and makes-you-smile video) from 2008 that inspired several flash mobs and a social clip with contributions from fans:



More Jovanotti on YouTube:

::: Tutto l'amore che ho: WATCH/LISTEN
::: Ti porto via con me: WATCH/LISTEN
::: Il più grande spettacolo dopo il Big Bang: WATCH/LISTEN
::: Tanto tanto tanto: WATCH/LISTEN
::: Baciami ancora: WATCH/LISTEN
::: A te: WATCH/LISTEN

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photograph via

Black Nannies

"The nanny phenomenon is closely allied to colonialism where servants administered ruling class needs. In South Africa, nannies are most often historically disenfranchised, working class, black woman."
Goldman, 2003


Photograph of a girl on the bench in Johannesburg taken by Peter Magubane, via

During the apartheid years, it was not only the affluent middle class who employed (black) domestic workers. White working classes had servants too.
South African domestic workers were legally bound by the Master-Servant Act. Non-performance and contractual breach included whipping and imprisonment. Domestic service was "a microcosm of the exploitation and inequality on which the entire social order was based". In this microcosm, the nanny experienced a "triple oppression": the intersection of ethnic, gender and class exploitation.
Live-in domestic workers lived in the "servant's quarter", typically at the back of the property. These were substandard living quarters without electricity and running water. They suffered extreme isolation since other people - their families, their friends - had no access. Due to the long working hours there was hardly any time to visit others. But even in their leisure time they were not free as they could be called in any time to do some extra work (Goldman, 2003).


Photograph taken on 18 May 1966: A white infant is bottle bed by her black nanny as her brother plays behind the "Nannies Only" seat in an all-white park in Johannesburg, via

"On any given day I would come home from school to find my nanny hanging out washing, or Samson, our neighbour's gardener, trimming the hedge between our houses. It never occurred to me that, other than nannies and gardeners, no one in my street was black. I never questioned why all my friends, except for a few snot-covered black toddlers who were sent home before they could talk, were white. I never wondered where home for those toddlers was. Never even thought to ask, as I helped my nanny pack her Christmas hamper, where she was going. (...)
Neatly segregated, I never noticed anything wrong with the way we were.
When I was 12, all that changed. As I stepped off my 'whites only' school bus, I had to step over the body of a black woman, the victim of a hit-and-run on Robert's Avenue. She was dressed in a green pinafore, the sort nannies wore. Someone had placed a newspaper over her face, but other than that, there was nothing to protect her from the sun, the ants and our curious stares. For three days she remained, unmoving, in front of my stop, and for three days I stepped gingerly over her, holding my breath. Eventually my mother called the police and demanded she be removed, commenting that they never would have left her there had she been white. The next day she was gone, but the knowledge that the indignity she had suffered was because of the colour of her skin stayed with me, and the way I viewed my world began to change.
Like many white South African children, I was in the care of a black nanny from an early age. By the time I stepped off that bus, I was a mish-mash of cultures, the purity of whiteness our government was trying so hard to preserve existed only on the surface. One of my earliest memories is of sitting at our kitchen table, talking to Gladys, my Zulu nanny, while a pot of mielie pap porridge bubbled on the stove. Served hot with butter and sugar, the porridge was delicious, though the pale yellow grains of ground maize made it a little gritty and I had to suck my teeth all the way to school."
Rachel Zadok


Photograph of children sitting on a bench along the waterfront in Durban taken by Dennis Lee Royle, via

"The human-to-human contact, as personal as it was, took place in a situation where race was the primary designator of social standing. Skin was the marker of not simply position in the economy, but supposedly also of superiority-inferiority. Historically this relationship was one of master and slave. It was in this larger context that both participants entered the relationship with a series of presumptions: for the master (and later his children) there was the supposition of dominance, where the servant had (been socialised and) come to accept her subordination. Inevitably the domestic worker as a black person came to be a receptacle of revulsion (the prevailing cultural mores), “an opportunity for white children to discover and experiment with attitudes and styles of racial domination” (Cock, 1989, p. 57). Certainly domestic workers were subject to numerous practises and rituals of inferiority. These rituals of inferiority afforded the employer ego enhancements that emanated from having an ‘inferior’ present; validating her lifestyle, her class and her racial privilege, her entire social world. The relationship thus provided the employer with ideological justifications for the economic and racially stratified system in which she lived and from which she derived benefit."
Goldman, 2003

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- Goldman, S. (2003). White Boyhood under Apartheid: The Experience of Being Looked After by a Black Nanny. Doctoral thesis: University of Pretoria

Narrative images: Femmes Algériennes

"I would come within three feet of them. They would be unveiled. In a period of ten days, I made two thousand portraits, two hundred a day. The women had no choice in the matter. Their only way of protesting was through their look. It is this immediate look that matters. When one discharges a condenser, a spark comes out: to me, photography involves seizing just that instant of discharge. In these sessions, I felt a completely crazy emotion. It was an overwhelming experience, with lightning in each image. I held up for the world a mirror, which reflected this lightning look that the women cast at me."
Marc Garanger



In 1960, Marc Garanger, a 25-year-old draftee landed in Algeria against his will. He had put off his departure for the army as long as he could "hoping that the war would end without him". He became the regiment's photographer from 1960 to 1962. When Maurice Challes, head of the French army, decided to destroy mountain villages in Algeria and to transfer inhabitants to internment camps, Garanger was told to take photographs for identity cards Algerians were required to carry (via), cards that made them visible and legible to French colonial authorities (Eileraas, 2003), cards they had to carry in "regroupment villages" that were supervised from observation posts, encircled with barbed wire, closed at night (Naggar, 1996):

"Naturally he asked the military photographer to make these cards. Either I refused and went to prison, or I accepted. I understood my luck: it was to be a witness, to make pictures of what I saw that mirrored my opposition to the war. I saw that I could use what I was forced to do, and have the pictures tell the opposite of what the authorities wanted them to tell."
Marc Garanger

After the first day, the commandant ordered all women to be photographed without the veils they usually wore in public. For the Algerian women, the forced unveiling felt like standing before the camera naked (via), it was obscene and humiliating as for them, the veil is inseperable from the face, a second skin (Naggar, 1996). Some of them looked lost, vulnerable, others distressed and extremely angry. "They were firing at me with their eyes", Garanger later recalled (via). He was repeatedly struck by the violence he saw in the Algerian women's eyes when they met his camera's gaze (Eileraas, 2003).

"The gaze is a means of communication and knowledge, and I don't think that the people who I photographed had any illusions about that. Women's violent protestation of colonial aggression is visible in every one of their gazes. It is this gaze to which I want to bear witness." Marc Garanger, cited in Eileraas (2003)

"The women would be lined up, then each in turn would sit on a stool outdoors, in front of the whitewashed wall of a house. Without their veils, their disheveled hair and their protective tattoos were exposed. Their lined faces reflected the harshness of their life. The stiffness of their pose and the intensity of their gaze evoke early daguerreotypes. (...) In the Middle East, the veil is like a second skin among traditional people. It may be taken off only within the secrecy of the walls, among women or between husband and wife, but never publicly. Garanger’s portraits symbolize the collision of two civilizations, Islamic and Western, and serve as an apt metaphor for colonization. The women’s defiant look may be thought of as an ‘evil eye’ that they cast to protect themselves and curse their enemies."
Carole Naggar




"You have to understand that this is a military camp. This was war and they were forced to be photographed, so there was no communication. This had to happen. I had to take the picture, and they had no choice in being photographed."
Marc Garanger

"I was trying to give them back their humanity and their dignity through my portraits."
Marc Garanger

"Driven by a spirit of revolt, Garanger exploited photography's capacity to shape the national imagery. He tried to create images that would question the authoring (and auhorizing) functions of the colonial gaze. Given his ambivalent position vis-à-vis la mission civilatrice, Garanger opens up a space for disidentification with the racial and sexual politics embedded in colonial imagery."
Karina Eileraas (2003)




"La réalité c'est le mensonge, l'horreur. Et donc, pour survivre, pour m'exprimer avec mon œil, puisque les mots sont inutiles, je prends mon appareil photo. Pour hurler mon désaccord. Pendant vingt-quatre mois, je n'ai pas arrèté, sûr qu'on jour je pourrai tèmoigner, raconter avec des images."
Marc Garanger, cited in Howell (2010)

"I was very angry. France was forcing me into a war I did not want to do. Though everybody around me was saying "we won", I was convinced it was doomed. The outspoken opinions around me were so degrading that I gave even more strength to my pictures. All this was significant of what this war was about: These people were not considered human, but savages, beasts France could kill as pleased! That's the real aim of this war and nothing else: Racism!"
Marc Garanger



In 1961, Garanger started organising photographic exhibitions in France "to spark public debate about French military practices in Algeria". With his exhibitions and anti-colonial photo-essays, he helped to disturb the silence France kept regarding the Algerian War (Eileraas, 2003). This war, in fact, has been hardly documented in France as the country seems to have chosen an approach of willful forgetting and of "collective amnesia" (Naggar, 1996).

Garanger went back to Algeria in 2004 to meet the women he had photographed in the 1960s. The photographs he had taken were often the only ones the women had of themselves (via).

::: Interview with Marc Garanger (2010): LISTEN/WATCH







More:
- Fifty years after Algeria's independence, France is still in denial; The Guardian (2012), LINK
- The History of French-Muslim Violence Began in the Streets of Algeria; Time (2015), LINK
- France's unresolved Algerian war sheds light on the Paris attack, The Independent (2015); LINK
- Camus and France's Algerian Wars, The New Yorker (2012); LINK
- Algerian independence film draws French protest at Cannes (2010): WATCH




- Eileraas, K. (2003). Disorienting Looks, Ecarts d'identité: Colonial Photography and Creative Misrecognition in Leila Sebbar's Eherazade. In I. E. Boer (ed.) After Orientalism: Critical Entanglements, Productive Looks, 23-44. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi
- Howell, J. (2010). "Decoding Marc Garanger's Photographic Message in La Guerre d'Algérie vue par un appelé du contingent", Dalhousie French Studies, 92, 85-95.
- Naggar, C. (1996) The Unveiled: Algerian Women. In L. Heron & V. Williams (eds.) Illuminations: Women Writing on Photography from the 1850s to the Present, 422-426. Duke University Press
- Ptacek, M. M. (2015). Simone de Beauvoir's Algerian war: torture and the rejection of ethics. Theory and Society, 44(6), 499-535.
- photographs via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via

International Day of Reflection on the Genocide in Rwanda

"For some European commentators, the question is simple: African 'tribes' are possessed by 'ancestral hatreds' and periodically slaughter each other because it is in their nature to do so."
Prunier (2002)

"Rwanda was definitely not a land of peace and bucolic harmony before the arrival of the Europeans, but there is no trace in its pre-colonial history of systematic violence between Tutsi and Hutu as such."
Prunier (cited in Grünfeld & Huijboom, 2007)



When Europe "generously" divided Africa among European powers in 1884, Rwanda was ascribed to Germany. At that time, the Rwandan population was divided into three groups: Twa (1%), Tutsi (17%), Hutu (vast majority). These groups were not seen as different tribes, they "spoke the same language, shared the same religion, told the same myths and lived in the same places". They differed in appearances.
Then Belgium took over the German rule in Rwanda and implemented its colonisation policies. The Belgians reinforced the Tutsi dominance and supremacy over the Hutu and as they needed to know who was a Tutsi and who was not, in 1933, they gave all Rwandans identity cards classifying them as Hutu, Tutsi or Twa.

"Depending on their appearance, looking like a Tutsi, Hutu or Twa, they were classified as belonging to one group or the other. As a result of inter-marriages that in certain parts of Rwanda were very common, it was impossible to divide many Rwandans into certain groups on the basis of their physical features alone. Wealth could also be a decisive factor in gaining one identity card or another. People who had lot of money or many cows were often able to obtain a Tutsi card. The cards caused discrimination against the Hutu population in all aspects of life, which forced hundreds of thousands of Hutu to flee to neighboring countries."  (Grünfeld & Huijboom, 2007)

The Belgians fixed group identities differentiating between the physical features of the Hutu and Tutsi. They measured nose and skull size, described skin colour, head and body ... measures that decades later erased a Rwandan population.

"Physically different from Tutsis, Longman observes how the Hutus had broader features and were noticeably heavier, shorter, and darker. In contrast, Tutsi were thin, tall, and appeared to look more European. Gnomic differences between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes divided people of the same race, who pre-colonization and pre-genocide, were physically akin." (Nardone, 2010)

"The obsession with physical appearance, aided and abetted by the Tutsi ruling class, led the Europeans to all manner of humiliating folly: measuring of skulls and noses and all the discredited junk of the race theorists who thrived in the heyday of African colonialism. One Belgian doctor wrote: [The Tutsi] ... have a distant, reserved, courteous and elegant manner ... The rest of the population is [Hutu]. They are negroes with all the negroid characteristics ... they are childish in nature both timid and lazy, and as often as not, extremely dirty."  (Keane) 

It is highly debated among critics, whether the European colonisation incited the violence between the Hutu and the Tutsi that led to the genocide in the 1990s. The categories of Hutu and Tutsi were not invented by the colonisers but the policies Europeans introduced surely exacerbated them leading to an ethnic split "and ensured that the important feeling of belonging to a social group was fuelled by ethnic, indeed racial, hatred" (Grünfeld & Huijboom, 2007). The identity cards which once served to guarantee privilige to the Tutsi were later used to discriminate against them (Verpoorten, 2005).

"The role played by group classification on national identity cards in crimes of genocide in Rwanda and in Nazi Germany should trouble all persons concerned with prevention of genocide. In Nazi Germany in July 1938, only a few months before Kristallnacht, the infamous "J-stamp" was introduced on ID cards and later on passports. The use of specially marked "J-stamp" ID cards by Nazi Germany preceded the yellow Star of David badges. (...) Ethnic classification on ID Cards in Rwanda instituted by the Belgian colonial government and retained after independence, was central in shaping, defining and perpetuating ethnic identity. Once the 1994 genocide in Rwanda began, an ID card with the designation "Tutsi" spelled a death sentence at any roadblock. No other factor was more significant in facilitating the speed and magnitude of the 100 days of mass killing in Rwanda." Jim Fussell, Prevent Genocide International

According to a census carried out by Rwanda's Ministry of Youth, 937.000 Tutsi (almost 80% of the Tutsi population) and politically moderate Hutus were killed during the 100-day period from April to June 1994 (via and via).



- photographs of Antonia Locatelli (1937-1992), an Italian Roman Catholic missionary educator who had lived in Africa since 1968 and in Rwanda since the early 1970s. Locatelli was shot dead by a group of presidential guards in March 1992 after witnessing massacres on the Tutsi and while trying to save the lives of her pupils (via and via); according to Amnesty International she was killed while assisting thousands of Tutsi who were fleeing violent attacks (via), images via and via
- Grünfeld, F. & Huijboom, A. (2007). The failure to prevent genocide in Rwanda: The role of bystanders. Leiden & Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers
- Prunier, G. (2002). The Rwanda Crisis. History of a Genocide. London: Hurst & Company

An ABC for Baby Patriots (1899)

Mary Francis Ames (1853-1929), born Mary Frances Leslie Miller, authored and illustrated children's books in Great Britain and Canada as Ernest Ames or Mrs. Ernest Ames (literally via).



"Hundreds of mighty tomes have been written about the great colonial years when Britain ruled the waves but perhaps none summed it up so succinctly as this ABC for Baby Patriots first published in 1899. It provides an extraordinary view of the Victorian values and attitudes that made Britain great."
Bloomsbury Publishing




C is for Colonies.
Rightly we boast,
That of all the great nations
Great Britain has most.




"(...) it is 'empire' that shimmered to the schoolboy and, perhaps to a slightly lesser extent, the schoolgirl reader of British children's literature from the 1850s onward. It was empire that flushed pink British pride into a world map shown to be one-quarter 'British' in 1897, at the time of the Diamond Jubilee celebration of Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and Empress of India."
Wallace & Slemon (2011)




E is our Empire
Where sun never sets;
The larger we make it
The bigger it gets.




"'Empire' is rooted in the concept of 'supreme and extensive political dominion ... exercised by an emperor', and then later 'by a sovereign state over its dependencies' (OED). The personal element of the British emperor - 'Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India (as of 1876), Defender of the Faith' - was sometimes obscured in British children's literature of 'the period of high imperialism', and even in children's games and puzzles, where Britannia replaces the body of the emperor/empress."
Wallace & Slemon (2011)




"'English' schoolchildren found it relatively easy to identify with the shimmering, overdetermined category of 'Britishness' promulgated within the idea of empire, but non-English readers found themselves distanced, and internally split, by the category: 'subjects' of empire on the one hand, objects of empire on the other."
Wallace & Slemon (2011)




"Regardless of readership and address - child or adult, colonizer or colonized, imperialist or imperial subject - the question underlying writing for children and the matter of empire remains at heart one of interpellation, the calling into being of the child as sovereign or as split subject, hailed into complex social identifications by the seemingly simple but structurally complex, and continuing, literature of empire."
Wallace & Slemon (2011)




I is for India,
Our land in the East
Where everyone goes
To shoot tigers, and feast.




"Children, especially in the Victorian era, are not often involved in politics and care little for the subtle dynamics of empire. However, much as in adult literature, children’s literature provides unique insight into the culture of a period for the literary theorist. Written by adults, children’s literature becomes a natural vehicle for the worldview of the adult members of a culture to be transmitted to the new generation."
Griffin (2012)




K is for Kings;
Once warlike and haughty,
Great Britain subdued them
Because they'd been naughty.




L is the Lion
Who fights for the Crown...



M is for Magnates
So great and so good,
They sit on gold chairs
And eat Turtle for food



N is the Navy...




O is the Ocean...




P is our Parliament




Q is our Queen!
It fills us with pride
To see the Queen's coach
When the Queen is inside!




R is the Roast Beef
That has made Englad great...
S is for Scotland...




T is the Tub...
U is our Unicorn...




V's Volunteers...




W is the Word
Of an Englishman true;
When given, it means
What he says, he will do




Y as a rule means...
Y is for youngsters...




Z is the Zeal...




- Griffin, B. R. (2012). Tales of Empire: Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century Children's Literature. University of South Florida Scholar Commons, online
- Wallace, J.-A. & Slemon, S. (2011) Empire. In: Nel, P. & Paul, L. (eds.) Keyword for Children's Literature, 75-78, New York University Press



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