Chapter 20 Colonial Encounters

The story in the beginning of the chapter tells about how an english man spoke swahili to young Kenyan boys who spoke perfect english. The englishman explained that they normally did not speak english to the "natives". This made me think about some research I did on Zimbabwe. I was suprised to see that the official language of Zimbabwe id english. This is a result of the colinization of Zimbabwe by the British. I thought it was ironic that the emglish man refused to speak english with the native people considering the english were the reason for the natives converting their language to english in the first place. The colinization of countries resulted in loss of individualism and culture within the countries. Plantations were formed and the native people were put to work for the colinizers' benifits. A picture of native people working on a tea plantaion with the label Lipton printed across the tea bags made me think about the major corporations that include slave labor today. I began to wonder if the large corporations will ever be able to produce their products without the use of slave labor in foreign countries that had formerly been colinized. The colinization of countries often resulted in slavery and cruel gorverning. I am not sure that colinization was a good thing even though it did introduce new things around the world from different cultures. I still believe that we might have a better sense of these cultures if they were never colinized in the first place.