Elaine Savory

[The] association of wealth with whites and poverty with blacks is not accidental. It is the nature of the imperialist relationship that enriches the metropolis at the expense of the colony i.e. it makes the whites richer and the blacks poorer.

Walter Rodney, The Groundings With My Brothers, 1969:19

That imperialism which today is fighting against a true liberation of mankind leaves in its wake here and there tinctures of decay which we must search out and mercilessly expel from our land and our spirits.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1967:200

The neo-colonialism of today represents imperialism in its final and perhaps its most dangerous stage.

Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, 1965:ix

The birth of a people (their emergent consciousness) is a fascinating spectacle. The theater that accompanies it is a moving experience.

Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 1992:196

“Who with the Devil tries to play fair, Weaves the net of his own despair.” Derek Walcott, Tijean and His Brothers, 1972:156-157

“Len, Len, son, listen to me, son. Your soul is in bondage! A have to release you! A have to set you free!”

Trevor Rhone, Old Story Time, 1981:60-61

In the Caribbean, ¹ imperialism and strategies for defeating its ever mutating forms are not abstract, theoretical concepts, but lived, experienced realities which have gone on since the first settlements of Europeans and their arrangements for the provision of cheap plentiful labour. I have no space here ² for an extensive discussion of the conflicted issues surrounding the term imperialism, especially in the forms which are most relevant to this discussion, namely cultural imperialism (Tomlinson 1991) and neo-imperialism (Nkrumah 1965) and so must settle for a working definition

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