Decolonization: Not a Metaphor – decolonization is a concrete struggle for land, sovereignty, and life, and that colonized and oppressed peoples have the right to defend themselves against the violence used to keep them in chains. Colonialism was never peaceful. It was imposed through conquest, massacre, enslavement, and terror, and maintained through armies, police, prisons, and famine. Frantz Fanon described the colonial order as violence in its natural state, a system that yields only when confronted with greater force. The violence of the colonized, he argued, is a response to the violence that came first.

History shows how often peaceful roads to freedom were closed by force. After police massacred peaceful protesters at Sharpeville in 1960 and the apartheid state banned the liberation movements, Nelson Mandela and the ANC formed Umkhonto we Sizwe and turned to armed struggle. Amílcar Cabral's movement took up arms in Guinea-Bissau after Portuguese troops gunned down striking dockworkers. The Algerians, the Vietnamese, the Kenyans, and the Mozambicans won their independence only by fighting for it. When Patrice Lumumba and Salvador Allende tried to change their countries through elections, imperialist powers answered with coups and assassinations. In the United States, from Robert F. Williams and the Deacons for Defense to Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party, Black communities asserted their right to protect themselves from racist terror when the state refused to.

That right is recognized in international law. In 1982 the UN General Assembly reaffirmed the legitimacy of peoples' struggles for independence and liberation from colonial and foreign domination by all available means, including armed struggle. Neocolonialism enforces its control through debt, sanctions, proxy wars, and military bases, and the colonized still face the violence of occupation and siege, from Palestine to the Congo to Western Sahara. This print affirms that the oppressed are never obliged to accept their own destruction, and that real decolonization means the return of land and power to the peoples from whom they were taken.

• 1 print shipped in a rigid mailer (made from recycled cardstock)
• printed on acid-free, premium matte-photo paper

• paper weight + thickness: 250/m² / 66lbs 

*frame not included*