I am a historian specializing in Africa, and it is clear to me that Mr. Coates doesn’t know much history. The European nations that invaded and colonized Africa, mainly in the late nineteenth century, did not slaughter Africans with their machine guns in order to ‘tame’ them. Nor did they beat them or cut off their hands and feet in order to tame them. Nor did they dispossess them of their land to tame them. Instead, they did all that to make money.

Just as in the Americas in earlier centuries, Europeans invaded Africa in order to secure sources of raw materials and protected markets for their industrial products. In some parts of the continent they used forced labor and taxation to get Africans to produce cash crops for the international market, and then forced them to sell these commodities at below market prices to colonial marketing boards. That’s why they built railroads, with coerced or forced African and Asian laborers. Across the continent, Africans who resisted forced labor were beaten by their new colonial masters. In the Congo, the new masters cut off the hands or feet of Africans who did not collect their quota of latex for their Belgian rubber tycoons.

In other parts of Africa, the colonial governments gave away vasts tracts of African land to European settlers, who then established plantations. Of course, these plantations required lots of labor. So Africans had to work on these European plantations for the privilege of staying on the land that the settlers had just stolen from them— the settlers called these African laborers ’squatters’. And those Africans who had not lost their land to the settlers were forbidden to produce the cash crops that the settlers wanted to produce, in order to protect the latter from competition. Such was the case in the settler colonies such as Kenya, Algeria, Rhodesia and South Africa, to name a few.

In the case of Kenya, none of these settler plantations were seized at independence, in part because Jomo Kenyatta feared economic retaliation from Britain and capital flight. Many settlers sold their plantations and Kenya went into debt to buy many of these. Other settlers remained, and many of these learned to respect their African countrymen. Others, like the latest Lord Delamere, have clung to their colonial racism.

It’s one thing to expect impoverished Africans to accept colonial-era settlers who still profit from their vast stolen estates— but it’s quite another to have to listen to the stupid lie that these lands were stolen from Africans in order to tame or civilize them.

Or, considering the behaviour of the entire planet, you’re probably yearning for the day that space aliens colonize all of us, no?

However, something tells me that you believe that only scary nonwhite people should get that kind of treatment.

Yes; clearly we all -want- to be the Richard Nixon of the feminist blogosphere.

Look, is there ever any point where y’all consider that people might actually mean what they’re actually saying? that just because YOU don’t see ___ as racist doesn’t mean everyone has to agree with you? particularly the people on the receiving end?

you know, here’s where one probably ought to explain Colonialism And Its Legacy 101, but I’m all out of ’splaininess tonight, so “pull my finger, Frank” is just going to have to do, I’m afraid.