This war is not a conflict between Islam and the west or the rich north and the globalised south, but a conflict between two very different experiences of the world – the colonisers and the colonised.
Look at the brilliant paintings (Mother and Child, for example) of the Algerian painter, Mohammed Issiakhem, and you can see just how fecund this relationship between the colonised and the colonisers had become in spite of the great inequality between them.
But the rate of death rose in a very visible crescendo with the colonising missions that began in the 17th century: colonisers' languages were indispensable parts of their "civilising" toolkits.
For both, imperialism is presented primarily not through its effects on the colonised, but as a personal growth experience for the colonisers.
The progressive maharajahs, who ruled with the permission of British colonisers until 1947, have given way to elected leaders.
These were "homebodies", "adventurers", "colonisers", "conquistadors" and "citizens of the world".
He is most famous for "Open Veins of Latin America", which blamed the region's problems on European colonisers and the United States.
Indeed, the Arabs' British and French colonisers seldom took the view that Arabs were fit for democracy.
Hidden from Moroccan invaders in the 16th century, French colonisers in the 20th and random thieves and tyrants in-between, bundles of old documents are at last being recovered and conserved in new libraries in Timbuktu.More than 150,000 manuscripts, dating back as far as the 12th century, tell of battles, astronomy, the sciences and the music of the day.
It used to be an independent sultanate, which Dutch colonisers managed to subdue only in 1910.
But a spokesman insists that "we can't stand in the way of people or their right to seek legal recourse".Meanwhile, a group representing the Herero people of neighbouring Namibia, who suffered mass slaughter at the hands of German colonisers a century ago, is going to court to get compensation from German companies that operated there.
