THE CASE FOR COLONIALISM: A LECTURE

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THE CASE FOR COLONIALISM: A LECTURE
Given by Dr. Bruce Gilley at the Center for the Study of Western
Civilization, Texas Tech University, November 27, 2018
Introduction
I would like to thank Dr. Balch for his kind invitation to speak today. I also want
to applaud the students of Texas Tech University for their upholding – despite
the efforts of 23 faculty members here and a truly bizarre statement by your
President issued a few hours before this talk asserting that “there is no case for
colonialism” – of the primary principles of a university, namely vigorous debate
and the search for truthful knowledge, key qualities that lie at the heart of
Western civilization. This is the first time I have given a public talk on this topic,
more than a year since a global lynch mob tried to stop me from publishing my
peer-reviewed article “The Case for Colonialism”. The University of Oxford,
whose chancellor was the last colonial governor of Hong Kong, had to keep my
talk there in May secret because he could not trust his own faculty to behave
like adults. So, the open-minded students of Texas Tech here tonight should be
proud.
Empirical Research
In September 2017, my peer-reviewed article “The Case for Colonialism” was
published in an advance online version of the Third World Quarterly. The purpose
of the article was to outline what I and many colleagues in the harder social
sciences believe is the clear evidence for the benefits and legitimacy of the
second phase of European imperialism, which ran from roughly the mid-1800s
to the mid-1900s. I also spent about half the paper discussing how those

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valuable lessons could be recovered by todays’ weak and failed states. A
professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government wrote to me, the thesis
that I advanced in the paper “has been brewing for some time” as we gain
more historical perspective on the human disaster that was decolonization.
But for the 16,000 people around the world who signed petitions demanding
the retraction of the article, any discussion of this evidence needed to be
suppressed. A week after the article’s appearance, the editorial team at the
journal asked for my permission to withdraw the article because they had
received death threats. I readily consented. The article was re-published the
National Association of Scholars house journal Academic Questions this past
April.
One of the fairest criticisms of the paper is that it did not provide enough
evidence for its claims about the objective benefits and subjective legitimacy of
colonialism. To that end I have since provided what is in effect the missing
bibliography of the paper entitled “Contributions of Western Colonialism to
Human Flourishing: A Summary of Research”, now available in its Version 1.0
on my website and on ResearchGate. I could easily spend this entire talk going
through the rigorous social scientific research that I gather together there which
in my mind shows what should be a statement of the obvious: when a more
advanced society is given the opportunity to diffuse its economic, technological,
administrative, and educational systems to a less advanced society that by and
large welcomes its presence, the results are so obviously good compared to
what would otherwise have happened in that society that the only interesting
questions are how large the positive effects are.

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I would highlight from that bibliography recent work by Feyrer and Sacerdote
(2009) as well as Easterly and Levine (2012) on economic development; by
Schuerkens (2003) on labour mobility and wage growth; by Donaldson (2018)
on railroads; by Samaddar (2008) on the rule of law; by Broms (2017) as well
as Feger and Asafu-Adjaye (2014) on public finances; by Shaw (2015) as well
as Sartori (2006) on human rights; by Hariri (2012) on modern state-building;
by Olsson (2009) as well as Woodberry (2012) on democracy; by Basu (1974)
on education; by Masani (2018) on cultural preservation and articulation; by
Grindal (2015) on the abolition of slavery; by Selhausen (2015) on female
emancipation; by Calvi and Mantovanelli (2015) on public health; by
Boomgaard (1989) on food supply and population growth; and by Etemad
(2007) on the vanishingly small numbers of Europeans in colonial
administrations which I think speaks to the legitimacy of colonial rule.
From this research, we know that, in terms of body count, nothing comes close
to anti-colonialism in terms of having cost lives and prevented lives. You
simply have to do the math and compare trajectories in the late colonial period
of the 1920s onward – when populations were growing, food supply
expanding, life expectancy leaping upwards, government administration
improving, wages and living standards bowling forward, and plans for self-
government unfolding -- and compare the widening gap of those trends with
where most, but not all, former colonies ended up by, say, the late 1980s.
But I fear that such a talk would not change many minds because as I have
come to realize, this is not really a scientific debate. Most anti-colonial critics
will roll their eyes when you try to engage in them in questions of social
scientific research because their real motivation is not getting history right but
getting the present right. Either they reject research findings as yet more

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evidence of Western imperialism and the need to “decolonize research” and
replace it with some kind of ideologically progressive form of story-telling. Or
they fear that formerly colonized peoples have such fragile psyches that they
could not withstand an encounter with facts that make them uncomfortable.
You may have heard of the case of Helen Zille, the former premier of the
Western Cape province in South Africa who in June this year was found guilty
by the country’s ethics board of improper conduct for tweeting after a visit to
Singapore that South Africa should similarly build on the valuable inheritance
of colonialism rather than trash it. South Africa provides a powerful image of
this problem: it’s twenty-five year slow-motion collapse since the end of
apartheid is closely linked to its inability to embrace its British colonial past. In
1993, the average Singaporean was 4.5 times wealthier than the average South
African. Today, they are 7 times wealthier. In 1993, it took one Singapore dollar
and 1.8 South African rand to buy a US dollar using purchasing power
exchange rates. Today, it takes just 84 Singapore cents to buy a US dollar but
6.2 South African rand.
Such declines in living standards might not make great photos but they cost far
more lives. The ethics board that censured Zille cited the mob attack on my
article as evidence that the voicing of pro-colonial viewpoints should be
curtailed. In her defense, Zille quoted no less an authority than Nelson Mandela
citing the benefits of British colonialism. Clearly, these are lessons that the
lawless and ignorant public prosecutor who found Zille guilty does not want to
learn. Nor do most anti-colonial critics.
There is a second reason why I do not think it would be productive to go
through the social scientific research on colonialism. We today live in a post-

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truth era in which social media, Wikipedia, and Google are more authoritative
sources of information than robust research. It took David Donaldson of MIT 10
years to research and publish his new article in the American Economic Review
showing that railroads in India had positive economic effects. It takes any critic
one second on Google to find the Congress politician Shashi Tharoor declaring
in the Guardian that the railroads were “a colonial scam” that harmed Indians.
So I am going to use this talk to engage in a more rhetorical and topical
presentation so that, at the very least, the arguments for colonialism are made
clear.
Baba of Karo
In 1887, a woman belonging to the Muslim Hausa ethnic group was born in the
slave-based Sokoto Caliphate of what is today northern Nigeria. The Caliphate
was a creation of the Fulani ethnic group which had defeated and subjugated
rival tribes in a series of wars between 1804 and 1808, including the Habe
branch of the Hausa to which the woman belonged. Fulani rule decayed with
each successive ruler so that by 1886, when the British government gave a
monopoly for trading in the region to the Royal Niger Company, the subject
peoples of this empire were ready for a change. The Royal Niger Company
found ready partners willing to sign treaties in exchange for liberation from
Fulani autocracy. In 1899, the British government assumed control of the region
from the Royal Niger Company and in 1900 its troops – mostly black natives –
arrived in this woman’s village, named Karo, to assert their control.
“We Habe wanted them to come, it was the Fulani who did not like it,” the
woman, known as Baba, recalled. Why you might ask would an African
woman welcome European colonization? Baba explained: “When the

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Europeans came, the Habe saw that if you worked for them, they paid you for
it. They didn’t say, like the Fulani: ‘Commoner, give me this! Commoner, bring
me that!’ Yes, the Habe wanted them; they saw no harm in them.”
Was this just an initial response that Baba of Karo later regretted? No, far from
it. As she explained, life got immeasurably better after British colonization. The
best thing the Europeans did was free slaves and depose indigenous tyrants.
“The Europeans don’t like oppression but they found a lot of tyranny and
oppression here, people being beaten and killed and sold into slavery.” For her
personally, another benefit was the improved status of women. “In the old days
if the chief liked the look of your daughter he would take her and put her in his
house; you could do nothing about it. Now they don’t do that.”
Baba of Karo told her story over a six-week period in December 1949 and
January 1950 to the English anthropologist Mary Felice Smith. The testimony
was published as Baba of Karo: A Woman of the Muslim Hausa in 1954.1 Your
library holds this book. And you can listen online to an interview that the BBC
did earlier this year with Mary Felice Smith, now in her 90s.
What are we to make of this first-hand account of an African woman’s
experience of the coming of colonialism? “It is strange that Baba welcomes the
coming of the British,” wrote a scholar from Niger in a 1994 essay.2 Yet a
moment’s reflection shows why it made sense, he noted. Baba of Karo faced a
concrete choice as a young girl between the relatively benign rule of the British
and the fearsome rule of Fulani tyrants and the slave and wife-raiders they
protected. So, he writes, it was not the British but the slave raiders and the
Fulani who were the “nasty Other.”

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In fact, the British never became the nasty Other for Baba or Karo. She was
perfectly content in her cultural space, and the British protected and enlarged
that cultural space by removing the threats to it from slave raiders and Fulani
tyrants. The peace and security of British rule were the main changes that
colonialism brought. Life went on more or less as usual in other respects, which
is why no one thought of resisting the British. There was no tension in Baba’s
worldview between being pro-colonial and pro-Habe. Quite the opposite. The
British facilitated the articulation of an authentic, living, and surviving Habe
culture.
Edward of Boston
Why do I dwell at such length on the story of Baba of Karo? Because it is such a
profound rebuke to the contemporary anti-colonial writers who presume to
make the choices that women like Baba faced over a century ago. Among the
widely circulated critiques of my paper, one was written by an American
journalist who found some gruesome photos from King Leopold’s Congo on the
Internet and ramped up the outrage with claims that my paper amounted to
Holocaust denial. If you will indulge me, let us imagine a conversation between
Baba of Karo and a composite of the various writers who have attacked my
paper whom I will call Edward of Boston.
Edward: Baba, how could you endorse a system that dismantled your
governing institutions and replaced them with unaccountable alien rule?
Baba: Actually, Edward, our governing institutions even before the Fulani
empire were more autocratic than anything the British imposed. In any case, like
most colonized peoples, we lived under alien rule already when the Europeans
arrived. Either a rival ethnic group, or a rival sub-group or faction were always

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in charge. Circa 1900, rule by the British – the most accountable political system
in the world at the time – versus the caliphs of Sokoto. Hell ya!
Edward: But once you accepted British rule, self-government became impossible
whereas you could have slowly democratized the Sokoto caliphate.
Baba (eyes as big as saucers): The British began talking about preparing their
colonies for self-government in the 1850s. The caliphate believed only in the
rule of Islam. Colonialism was the pathway to self-government, isn’t that what
happened in Boston too Edward?
Edward: What about the atrocities committed by colonial rulers throughout the
19th and 20th centuries – Amritsar, Namibia, Mau Mau, and in your country of
Nigeria there were those 57 women traders shot dead by colonial police in
1929 over taxes? There are a lot of pictures and Wikipedia articles on the
Internet.
Baba: I see how enlivened you are talking about atrocities Edward. Why do you
know so little about the atrocities in world history that did not involve
Europeans? One reason is they are not recorded. You will find no pictures of
them on the Internet, Edward, and no Wikipedia articles. We know about the
frontier wars in British settlement colonies because they were recorded,
investigated, debated, and yes, the atrocities were punished by the British. You
liked the picture of severed hands in the Congo under King Leopold II, Edward.
Have you seen the pictures of the piles of bodies in the eastern Congo under al-
Zubayr and or the torched villages left in the Congo by Hamed ben Mohammed
al-Murjebi (better known as Tippo Tip)? They were the most fearsome of the
many Sudanese, Nubian, and Egyptian slave traders and ivory tyrants who

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terrorized the Congo before the relatively benign rule of King Leopold II. Would
it surprise you Edward, to learn that most people welcomed King Leopold’s rule,
indeed it was this that explains how Tippo Tip, who began as governor of the
king’s eastern holdings, lost control?3 Why are there only four books on Tippo
Tip but at last count hundreds on Leopold II? Do you care about the actual
history of people like my own?
And by the way, King Leopold’s Congo Free State was not a Belgian colony. It
was a private fiefdom whose abuses were precisely the argument in favor of
Belgian colonization in 1908. How could you get such a basic fact wrong
Edward? Yes, perhaps you should be forgiven because the American journalist
Adam Hochschild subtitled his 1998 book King Leopold’s Ghost “A story of
Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa”. I guess American journalists are
just sloppy with facts, although Hochschild notes in his book that the free state
“was shared in no way with the Belgian government.”
Edward: But you keep changing the subject Baba. My subject is colonial
atrocities.
Baba: My subject is saving human lives. Even when native atrocities were
recorded somehow – like the Nama massacre of a fifth of the Herero population
in today’s Namibia in a single day on August 23, 1850 at a place now known
as Murder Hill where women’s feet were chopped off to obtain the copper rings
they wore around their legs – you don’t seem interested. Didn’t you read what I
told Mary Felice Smith about the constant warfare and murder my people faced
under the Fulani? We did not have cameras like the Belgian lawyers
investigating the atrocities of King Leopold’s private fiefdom. In any case, I
guess you would roll your eyes in boredom. And by the way, the suppression

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of the Mau in Kenya and of the Women’s War in Nigeria were both justified. The
use of force was proportional to the threat. That’s why most Kenyans and
Nigerians supported the colonial governments, indeed did most of the
restoration of order and prison work. Amritsar and Namibia, on the other hand,
were crimes, to be sure. And they were immediately recognized as such by the
colonial governments and those responsible punished.
In any case, sorry to come back to counterfactuals Edward, but the Herero and
Nama in Namibia, for example, were long-time rivals who were stockpiling
arms for a war on each other at the time of the German settlement. Do you think
they would have resolved their differences with a roundtable conference and
knitting therapy? Yes, I am lucky. I was not a victim of a colonial atrocity or a
colonial settlement war. I was however the victim of a Fulani atrocity after
slave raiders carried off members of my family. Please read my book Edward.
Even the libraries in Boston have copies.
Edward: Even, so, Baba, you seem to be engaging in a sort of morally cold-
hearted cost-benefit analysis. That the good things that came with colonialism
can offset the bad things.
Baba: I’m still not sure what the bad things are in my case Edward, but to give
you the benefit of the doubt, let’s throw some possible things out there: the
humiliation and psychological harms of alien rule; the short-circuiting of our
indigenous development path; the empowerment of “chiefs” with the backing
of colonial coercion. Yes, perhaps these were harms in some cases. And when
harms cross some threshold, they can never be justified by goods. But none of
these, even if true, which I doubt, came close to that. Are you saying Edward,
that the survival and longer-lives that my Habe people enjoyed after the British

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should be weighed against unaccountable chiefs or psychological harms that
seemed mainly a concern of French-educated intellectuals?
Edward: Maybe you just have false consciousness Baba. You believed the
British were legitimate rulers, rulers who had more of a right to rule your people
than the feasible alternatives, because you really had no choice. You had a gun
to your head and rationalized your behavior.
Baba: Didn’t your professors ever teach you how demeaning it is to dismiss
viewpoints your disagree with among common people as false consciousness?
Maybe the silly little people like me could not think for ourselves, as you imply
Edward. A whole generation of Western academics has dismissed voices like
mine as false consciousness. But it was the elites who chose to invite and ally
with the British in northern Nigeria. They had a choice to fight, but chose
cooperation. The man who would become the premier of northern Nigeria at
independence, also from a small tribe, wrote this of the coming of the British:
“There was no ill-will after the occupation. We were used to conquerors and
these were different; they were polite and obviously out to help us rather than
themselves.”
Edward: OK, but really colonialism goes way further back, to the 16th through
18th centuries when the British were major slavers and their American,
Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand settlers were massacring all and
sundry. Shouldn’t we throw this into the equation too?
Baba: Should we? And call them morally reprehensible for doing what every
non-Western culture, including my own, was also doing at the time, simply
without the technological and economic and organizational capacity of the West

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to make it work? These were frontier battles. Every empire – Ottoman, Qing,
Russian, Japanese – was expanding its frontiers through warfare at the time:
that’s what empires did. The Zulus in southern Africa, the Maori in the south
Pacific, the Bantu and Buganda in east Africa – I mean do you know how they
came to occupy their “ancestral” homelands Edward? And not only in ancient
times. The Maori of New Zealand massacred most of the 1,600 Moriori people
on the Chatham Islands in a single invasion of 1835, and then claimed the
islands as their ancestral homeland.
And where did the ideas for changes to those expansionist norms come from?
Actually from Europe: the Dutch lawyers who developed ideas of international
law, the Quakers who led the push against slavery, the Scottish and English
liberals who developed ideas of land rights. So you are appealing to norm
shifts that came from the European colonizers themselves. It matters. It’s not the
same as burning down a fellow’s house and then offering to rebuild it. A better
analogy is the slum-lord who has a moral awakening and decides she is going
to live better. She chooses to set higher standards for her rental units, fixing
broken pipes and keeping heaters on. She advocates among her fellow slum
lords to make this a norm. Eventually they make it a law. Are you telling me
that she has no business claiming to have done good because she used to be a
slum lord?
Edward: Ok, but in the end, they stole your money. They took your
commodities. They locked you into economic dependency.
Baba: They paid us, as I told Mary Felice Smith. My family’s children had job
opportunities we could never have dreamed of. And by the way, you Marxists
have a strange way of understanding economics. Commodities cannot simply

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be pulled from the Earth and deposited in a bank. If they could, resource-rich
countries would all be rich. Nigeria has oil. It remains poor. Why? Because
wealth comes from an economic system: free markets, the rule of law, global
trade, corporate organization, social trust, investment certainty, worker training
and education, infrastructure. Do you think this stuff just “happens” Edward?
Do you have any idea why Boston is so prosperous? Because of the large
number of clams in Boston harbor?
Edward: Baba, you are really flogging a dead horse here. I mean, nothing,
nothing will ever convince most people that colonialism was a good thing.
Baba: Maybe. But truth matters to me, Edward, and it should matter to you too.
And secondly, truth matters because it has lessons for today. Have you heard of
Chinua Achebe? In his last book, he reminded his readers that Nigeria
benefitted a lot from British colonialism and urged them to reclaim some of that
past, like excellent administration and meritocracy in government and business.
Edward: I can’t debate this any longer, I am late for a mental decolonization
rally at the graduate student union.
Baba: Your mind has been colonized by half a century of gibberish about the
evils of Western colonialism. A little decolonization of that material would be
good for you.
Edward: (frowns angrily)
Baba: (smiles wearily)

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Facts and Academic Rigor
Over the past year, I have had many debates of this sort. The critics have now
retreated to calls for censorship with the claim that while they believe in free
speech and academic freedom, they draw the line when it comes to research on
colonialism that they believe is factually inaccurate and/or “violent and
oppressive.” The new terms they have invented are “academic integrity” and
“academic monitoring” so that scholars with inappropriate ideological
orientations, such as me, are put under the charge of scholars with advanced
ideological views who seem mostly to be found in English departments. As a
scholar of China, my teaching of Mao’s Cultural Revolution will never be the
same.
One obvious response to such charges is, to borrow John Stuart Mill’s defense
of liberty, that you will never really know whose arguments are factually
correct and normatively defensible unless they are exposed to the strong gale of
counter-argument. I am glad that Dr. Bjerk accepted Dr. Balch’s invitation to
rebut my arguments for that reason.
The more substantive response is this: if factual or social scientific validity and
normative defensibility are the standards by which we should judge scholarship
on colonialism, then I submit that the problems of inaccuracy,
misrepresentation, and ethical sophistry giving rise to scholarship that
perpetuates violence and oppression against formerly colonized peoples lie in
the main with the anti-colonial scholars who dominate the contemporary
academy.
Testimonies

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Several people from former colonial areas have written essays in support of my
original article, which you can find on my website. One was written by a
Nigerian women who is an educational consultant in that country. She called
the mob attacks on my article a “bilious personification of anti-intellectualism.”
“Many Nigerians,” she wrote, “see the colonial era as something of a golden
age.” The most lasting legacy, in her view, was the positive impact on
education, which is the focus of her research. “Will I ever be able to publish my
research?” she asked. “This is the fearful state that outraged mobs have put
myself and others in. But I won’t be intimidated. I will say what I believe to be
true, no matter what.” The censorious Maoists have intimidated this Nigerian
woman who is trying to resurrect the educational system of her country by
recovering lessons from British colonial institutions so that young people there
have a future.
Recently, I received an email from a young Indian scholar studying for a
graduate degree in Shakespeare here in Texas. He wrote:
My great grandfather, born to field laborers in Southern India, was…educated by
Christian missionaries, Britishers, the very Colonizers I am supposed to hate. He was,
having been so educated, commissioned by the British Government to found and run a
high school in the village of his birth. His son, my grandfather, was the first of that
village to complete high school, as well as to complete university. Moreover, he was
employed by the British Government as a statistician, which was very prestigious in
those days. My grandmother, similarly educated was able to go so far as a masters
degree because of the educational system set up by the British. It is because of
Colonialism that my family was educated, elevated far beyond the station of their birth,
and it is because of this Colonialism that I am able to study Shakespeare at an American
university, rather than labor in a field in India.

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Both of these authentic voices from people in former colonized areas are being
told by progressives mostly in the West that they need to shut up. I stand with
the former.
Intellectual Turn
Still, to Edward’s point about flogging a dead horse, why should we really
care? Many of my colleagues will say privately that they agree with me, but
why enter into this fraught debate and risk being called a white supremacist or
a Holocaust denier? It’s not worth it. To some extent I agree, and I think that
pragmatism is the best way forward for many countries. “It’s complex. It brings
back bitter memories. The question is how to move forward.” So, how to move
forward? I think there are both intellectual and institutional prescriptions, but I
put the most store by the former.
In an essay for the Indian magazine Open published in October, I wrote about
the profound psychological disconnect that continues to afflict many Third World
countries in their relations with the West. I was writing about the Nobel laureate
V.S. Naipaul, who died in September, one of the great intellectuals to emerge
from the Third World. A native of Trinidad, whose ancestors had migrated to the
British colony from India, Naipaul was profoundly aware of the “what might
have beens” in his own life. He called the West the leader of a “universal
civilization” that was alone freely accessible to all and sundry, including
himself. Colonialism had given countries and peoples like him access to this
universal civilization. It was regenerative and beneficial because it allowed the
world’s diverse civilizations and cultures to flourish. Those who tore it down
were like children pounding on the chests of their parents.

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I began this whole thing with another article that pointed out similar thrusts in
the writing of Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian writer who is misrepresented in the
academy as anti-colonial. China’s economic boom is a result of the influence of
colonial Hong Kong. That British colony, according to Paul Romer, the former
chief economist of the World Bank, did more to reduce poverty in the Third
World than a half-century of Western aid because it created a model that China
could emulate and use. Success requires coming to terms intellectually with the
positive legacies of colonialism, as China did when it ousted the Maoists and as
Helen Zille urged on her countrymen.
But this intellectual turn will require a massive Enlightenment. No less an
otherwise reliable newspaper than the Wall Street Journal recently carried an
approving feature story on the “decolonization” of Belgium’s Royal Museum for
Central Africa. According to the article, the “woefully dated statuary” and
“exoticism” of the museum is being airbrushed in a makeover in which
“colonial-era imagery” will be “countered” with new images showing
“colonial-era oppression” and asserting, in the title of one statue, a
“Burgeoning Congo” including a “robot used to control traffic in Kinshasa.”
Colonial “apologists” will be sent packing by the new museum and instead
Belgian visitors will be abjectly told of the cruelty of their ancestors, and, by
ascription, themselves and how, but for their meddling in central Africa there
would have been a land of milk and honey.
The fact is that the Congo under al-Zubayr and Tippo Tip was doing anything
but burgeon and after the Belgians colonized the country in 1908 it entered into
its only era of burgeoning, which lasted until so-called independence in 1960
under pressure from those who the Great Chief of Luanda called “loud-mouthed
minorities.” This, by the way, according to the contemporary academy, makes

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the Great Chief of Luanda a white supremacist, a charge that I presume the old
chief would have considered evidence of the inscrutable ways of the West.
And those robot-controlled intersections in Kinshasa? It’s a story the Western
liberal media loves and it repeats old tropes about an African renaissance. But it
is more evidence of Africa imploding not burgeoning. They are designed to
prevent bribery caused by mistrust between police and people. The robots cost
$27,000 each and are paid for by foreign aid. They sidestep the issue of
administrative capacity and state-society trust. A writer for the Atlantic calls
them “a public relations stunt that turns attention away from serious growth
and infrastructure issues in the city.” They appeared after municipal elections
were cancelled “the flashy, modern way to distract the public from scrutinizing
bad governance.”
So, the decolonization of the Royal Museum for Central Africa perfectly
embodies the fatuous nature of anti-colonialism: a Belgian colonial state that
made lives better for ordinary Congolese is being scrubbed from history and
replaced by a robo-cop that symbolizes the tyranny and dysfunction of anti-
colonial Congo and its guilt-ridden Western supporters.
Lands of Hope
The institutional fixes are more straight-forward. Look at this picture. I chose it
because it is relatively benign. Like Edward of Boston, I could have showed you
pictures of the last 70 years of horrific human atrocities committed by anti-
colonial regimes against their own people. It is of a boy found by a Danish aid
worker in Nigeria in 2016 who had been left to starve to death by the local
community because they believed he was a witch. UNICEF estimates that in this
one southwestern state of Nigeria, there are 15,000 children similarly

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abandoned by their parents as witches and 10,000 a year added the the streets
nationwide. I pair the photo with another from the Biafra war that erupted in
Nigeria shortly after independence and cost between 1 and 3 million lives.
The Danish aid worker who found this boy got together with her local Nigerian
colleagues and established the Land of Hope Children’s Center in Nigeria for
rescued children. The Nigerian government is unable and unwilling to act
against this cultural practice. Exxon-Mobil has funded the Center along with a
lot of international donors and it is essentially playing the “colonial” role of
filling in a governance deficit. Here is a picture of the boys, the staff, and Hope
himself. There could be many more Lands of Hope with a re-engaged and
explicitly colonial approach to these countries.
The borrowing and replication of governance functions embedded in a country’s
colonial past is one way that I suggested in my paper for re-colonizing the
failing parts of the Third World. The other was for Western governments to
formally share some sovereign functions like public finance and law and order
as has been successfully attempted in various African countries in recent years.
There is a third way. What do you think would happen if the British were invited
back to rule a small parcel of land in Nigeria, somewhere where no one lived,
just as Lagos, Singapore, Accra, Hong Kong, and Aden were sparsely-populated
places until British colonialism turned them into humane, decent, and
opportunity-filled places? This is the idea of a charter city suggested by Paul
Romer back in 2009 in which the host nation would consent to hand over
sovereignty for some fixed period, say 99 years, in order to stimulate
development and diffusion of good governance. Over that period, people from

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the host nation who wanted to migrate to the charter city could do so at the
discretion of its authorities.
Charter cities would be risky. Sir Paul Collier told our gathering at Oxford in
May that the problem with charter cities is that if they do not work, local
politicians will be blamed, and if they do, local politicians will also be blamed.
This all stems from a fundamental problem: anti-colonialism has become so
entrenched not just in the Western academy but in the politics of many failed
states that nothing short of a Enlightenment that ushers in a productive
encounter with the modern world will do. Charter cities are the developmental
equivalent of a moon shot. Still, sometimes you reach the moon.
Ceremonial Stone Landscapes
Let me close with a reminder that this issue is coming soon to a public policy
issue near you. A few weeks ago, I received from Rhode Island’s principal
archaeologist Timothy Ives an advance copy of his forthcoming paper in
Northeast Anthropology that discusses the growing problem of anti-colonial
agitation among contemporary native American activists. This is closely linked
to the “decolonizing” movement elsewhere. The specific question at stake in his
paper is whether mysterious piles of stones often found throughout New
England were left by early European farmers to prevent soil erosion, demarcate
boundaries, or simply store the debris from cleared fields, or by earlier native
groups as ceremonial stone landscapes with spiritual meaning.
Being a trained and professional archaeologist, Dr. Ives published a paper
arguing that most of the piles are from European settlers. Guess what
happened? Of course, you know: he was quickly labelled a racist with an

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unreformed colonial mentality whose research represented violence and
oppression against native groups and who should lose his job, if not worse.
Native American radicals intent on “decolonzing research” with so-called
“insurgent methodologies”, as in this case, are doing their people no favors,
although as neo-tribal elites they no doubt advance their careers. For such
approaches are an abandonment of the shared justification based on logic and
evidence that makes knowledge possible. They reduce native American
knowledge claims to nothing more than rent-seeking and political activism. That
is, they make them easy to ignore, thus marginalizing these groups.
The piles of stones? I am sure they will sort themselves out. I am more worried
about the children of native American communities and the children of anti-
colonial Third World countries being brought up in an toxic social atmosphere in
which they are taught from a young age that science is nonsense, that they are
eternal victims of colonial society, that they bear spiritual wisdom no matter
what choices they make in their lives, and that they serve their people by
rebelling against the modern world. That’s what I call violence and oppression.
And that, in a nutshell, is the case for colonialism. Thank You!
1 Smith, Mary Felice. Baba of Karo: A Woman of the Muslim Hausa. London: Faber & Faber, 1954.
2 Chaibou Elhadji Oumarou. “One Speaks, Another Writes: The Oral Autobiography of a Hausa Woman (1877-
1951),” CEA Critic, 57:1, 1994, pp. 20-30, at page 25.
3 Renault, Francois. Tippo Tip: Un Potentat Arabe en Afrique Centrale au XIXe Ciècle Paris: Société Française d'Histoire
d'Outre-Mer, 1987.