Daily quote by Berlin

• Few areas of the national life of those Western European countries failed to benefit from the decades of parasitic exploitation of the colonies. One Nigerian, after visiting Brussels in 1960, wrote: “I saw for myself the massive palaces, museums and other public buildings paid for by Congo ivory and rubber.” In recent times, African writers and researchers have also been amazed to find the amount of looted African treasure stacked away in the British Museum; and there are comparable if somewhat smaller collections of African art in Paris, Berlin, and New York. Those are some of the things which, in addition to monetary wealth, help to define the metropoles as developed and “civilized.”
  • Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 186