The trouble with the British was not just their fear of ‘savage’ or ‘native’ culture, which was a complex, syncretic, and always shifting form. They wanted to grasp it rather than flow with it. They were scared of a river-like flow of culture and ideas, since they were uprooted themselves and desperately needed to hold on to the familiar. Sometimes I believe that this is the colonizer’s true legacy: an inability to look at other humans as being capable of, and deserving of, fluidity—to flow as free as a river while simultaneously being as self-possessed as the ocean. We must not forget that
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