The Colonial Ledger

Everyone talks about the crimes of colonization. Ask for the number of its dead and the room fills with guesses. Ten million? Fifty? No one knows. An estimate without names is not a count. It is the shape of work no one ever finished.

For sixty years we’ve lived in the same choreography. A minister flies to Paris, demands acknowledgment, receives scripted sympathy, returns home with nothing. Then another one tries. Same trip, same outrage, same disappointment. The colonizer points to our government. Our government points to the colonizer. And the people who carry the real stories are left out of the conversation entirely.

We know the game. The colonizer wiped the archives. The government keeps them empty. Each side uses the other as an alibi. Corruption excuses denial. Denial excuses corruption. Meanwhile the dead remain uncounted, and the living pretend this is normal.

A ledger would end this dance. A list of names, years, places, witnesses. Not guesses. Not fog. Facts. The kind of facts that survive courtrooms, outlive excuses and shut down the ritual of polite humiliation. Armenians understood this. Rwandans understood it. Holocaust institutions understood it from the beginning: numbers tied to real people change the balance of power.

Our governments will not build such a ledger. They have shown this for six decades. They are not only slow; they are comfortable with the ambiguity. Ambiguity protects power. Precision threatens it.

So we take the work back. Families, researchers, diasporas, archivists, students. Anyone tired of playing the same scene and expecting a different ending. Collect the testimonies. Trace the lineages. Mark the graves. Start small. One village, one family, one story. Stitch them together and the fog breaks.

This is not only about reparations. It is about dignity. Memory. Presence. The dead deserve to be counted. The living deserve to know what happened. A name written is a life returned to history. And a people who recover their dead recover themselves.

We cannot change what was done. But we can refuse to disappear with them. The ledger is the first refusal.

Appendix: The Colonial Kill Scoreboard (Africa Division)

France’s Uncounted: 2 Million to 20 Million?
Belgium’s Uncounted: 5 Million to 20 Million?
Britain’s Uncounted: Tens of Millions?
Portugal’s Uncounted: Unknown