The Europeans not only colonialized most of the world, they began to colonialize information about the world and its people. In order to do this, they had to forget, or pretend to forget, all they had previously known abut the Africans.
Interpretation
This quote highlights how European colonialism extended beyond physical territories to the manipulation of knowledge and narratives about colonized peoples.
John Henrik Clarke's quote emphasizes the historical impact of European colonialism, asserting that it was not limited to the occupation of lands but also encompassed the distortion and control of information regarding colonized peoples, particularly Africans. This process involved a selective amnesia, where colonizers intentionally chose to overlook or obliterate their previous understandings of these cultures to justify their dominance and rewrite history according to their narratives.
In practice
In a lecture on colonial history, to illustrate the impact of colonialism on cultural narratives.
I saw no African people in the printed and illustrated Sunday school lessons. I began to suspect at this early age that someone had distorted the image of my people. My long search for the true history of African people the world over began.
As the eldest son of an Alabama sharecropper family, I was constantly troubled by a collage of North American southern behaviors and notions in reference to the inhumanity of people. There were questions that I did not know how to ask but could, in my young, unsophisticated way, articulate a series of answers.
Anytime someone says your God is ugly and you release your God and join their God, there is no hope for your freedom until you once more believe in your own concept of the 'deity.'
I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.
Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.
The rise of African nations concurrent with the spread of the Nation of Islam and the civil rights movement gave black America a burst of pride over and above anything they had had since the decline of the movement of Marcus Garvey.
I knew from history that war comes with frightening regularity, often fought over the same ground and similar causes as previous conflicts.
Well into the 20th century, black people spoke of their flight from Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had.
The Great War was nobody's fault - or everybody's.
It is one of the ironies of this strange century that the most lasting results of the October revolution, whose object was the global overthrow of capitalism, was to save its antagonist, both in war and in peace - that is to say, by providing it with the incentive, fear, to reform itself after the Second World War, and, by establishing the popularity of economic planning, furnishing it with some of the procedures for its reform
The Great Migration can get forgotten if we don't pay attention or bear witness to it. It's part of my personal history and the history of millions of African Americans who left those oppressive conditions for better lives in the North. It's important to put that on the page.
History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.
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