While a lot of Sakawa practitioners have cooked up elaborate post-colonial justifications where they're just getting the white man back for taking all their gold a few, like our guide Seva, see Sakawa for what it really is: a massive bubble full of machete-weilding rioters just waiting to burst.
Even this echoes colonial precedents: justifications of governmental inaction in relation to indigenous morbidity and mortality in colonial Africa and India often stressed cultural resistance.
There, the Portuguese-speaking world's predisposition to melancholy (at least outside Brazil) has ample justification: colonial rule that was by turns negligent or brutal, and a heartbreaking post-colonial history of coups, political assassinations (four so far this year) and civil war.
To the postcolonial critics of the 1970s, the stories were little more than ideological justifications of colonial aggression; examples are almost too easy to find.
"The postcard, even — especially — when it pretends to mirror the exotic, is nothing but one of the forms of the aesthetic justification of colonial violence".
That such perceptions, and the consequent cultural representations, have served, and continue to serve, as implicit justifications for the colonial and imperialist ambitions of the European powers and of the United States.
It was conceived as a celebration of the colonial system and therefore a justification for it.
Coming from the likes of Mugabe and his henchmen, playing the colonial card is self-serving justification.
When Tipu's Tiger was displayed in London in the nineteenth century, British viewers of the time "characterised the tiger as a trophy and symbolic justification of British colonial rule".
Some suggested they were a convenient fiction, a colonial panic that provided another handy justification for extending British rule.
