colonialism

The watercolours that open the canon in 1926 came from the office of a Belgian clerk who also took in the head tax. On the painters’ own tapes, the freedom of the Élisabethville studio meant painting what its French director painted and selling to nobody. The curator who calls all of this a miracle bought close to ten thousand of the results.

Italy lost an army at Adwa on 1 March 1896. The New York Times found the winners Caucasian by April; Britain, France and Italy divided Ethiopia into spheres of influence by 1906; Italy came back with mustard gas in 1935.

Malagasy envoys reached London in 1837 to end an alliance, and the Foreign Office answered by setting their queen’s conduct against the heir to the British throne. Two centuries on, the encyclopedias still file the two reigns in different grammar.

Two cities still carry the Carrier Corps in their names. The graves are being opened now; the ledger is still being settled.

In 1706 a twenty-year-old prophetess was burned as a witch for teaching that Jesus was born in Kongo and that God wanted the slave wars ended. Everything we know of her survives in the handwriting of the men who pressed for the fire.

A dockworker’s evening in a Mindelo tavern, where bare feet were as unremarkable as the chairs and “Sodade” needed no footnote. Europe could not hear the Kriolu, so it fastened on what it could see, and printed an adjective she never asked for.

Haiti paid France for its own freedom until 1947. Britain finished compensating slave owners in 2015. Germany retired its Versailles bonds in 2010. No court called those debts too old. Claims running the other way are always too late.

Every land grab opens with a word: the people on the land are declared less than people. Scholarship spent the next century testing the word, with the victim in the dock and the accuser writing the questions. The other method was always available: name the speaker, date the wound that followed, and ask what the violence was for.

In 2022 Belgium handed the Kakuungu mask back to Congo as an indefinite loan, because its own law forbids giving anything away. The same three principles that keep it in Brussels are available to any African statute book willing to claim them. Stop asking; declare.

Sifr is Arabic for zero, and the root of cipher. One word, two European inheritances, and three operations this publication runs against what that word did to Africa’s record. Two to four essays a month, free to read.