La colonizzazione

Materie:	Appunti
Categoria:	Lingue
Voto:	1.5 (2)
Download:	57
Data:	01.06.2001
Numero di pagine:	3
Formato di file:	.doc (Microsoft Word)

Text
Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, at first was just an impression of heat and damp; the mist streamed along the lower streets and lay over the roofs like smoke. Nature, conventionally grand, rising in tree-covered hills above the sea and the town, a dull uninteresting green, was powerless to carry off the shabby tower, a Norman church built in the nineteenth century, sticking up out to the early morning fog.
This was an English capital city; England had planted this town, the tin shacks and the Remembrance Day posters, and had then withdrawn to the hillside to smart bungalows, with wide windows and electric fans and perfect service. Every call one paid on a white man cost ten shillings in taxi fares, for the railway to Hill Station no longer ran. They had planted their seedy civilization and then escaped from it as far as they could. Everything ugly in Freetown was Europeans: the stores, the churches, the Government offices, the two hotels; if there was something beautiful in the place it was native: the little stalls of the fruit-sellers which went up after dark at the street corners, lit by candels; the native women, rolling magnificently from church on a Sunday morning, the cheap European cottons, the deep coral on green flounces, the wide straw of the great shoulders. They were dressed for a garden party and they carried off cheap bright grandeur in the small backyards among the vultures.
The men were less assured; they had been educated to understand how they had enough power to express themselves in a soured officious way; they had died, in so far as they had once been 3 men, inside their European clothes.
(da Journey without Maps di G. Greene)
Contextualization
Graham Greene has a clear idea of the value of European civilization in Africa. Do you share his opinion or not? In either case state your reasons.
The author is clearly very disappointed by the European civilization in Africa. He accused the colonizers to have destroyed the local people’s traditions importing the European ones and he underlines the ugly contrast that western buildings and local buildings create in the landscape.
I share my opinion with Greene. Even if the colonization has made Europe a rich continent, it has impoverished several southern countries which weren’t able to fight against them. Europeans haven’t only stolen all those countries’ wealth but they’ve also taken there lots of unknown illness to the local people who died.
It’s clear that having an empire was a great chance for colonizers to get numerous profits such as the opportunity to emigrate, to increase any kind of trade but at the same time the conquests were followed by huge expenditures for the administration, the defence, the economic assistance to the colonies and unwanted conflicts.
For the ones who underwent this phenomenon there were negative effects (traditional life-styles were cancelled, cultures were destroyed and whole populations were exterminated) and positive effects (the contacts with the European culture which has taken some benefit for health, education and new technologies).
A few time ago I watched on TV a reportage about Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. The local population is poor and lives in the favelas while rich people are of European origins and live in the most exclusive places in the city. A woman said in an interview that she lived in her brother’s family’s little house with her nine children and she worked for 90$ a month. Lots of children live in the bad-smelling streets or under the bridges; they have no future so prefer to become criminals or to sell drug. What let me shocked was the evident contrast between the favelas situated close to the exclusive quarters.