Anti-colonial Movements, Role of Children

Anti-colonialism denotes the centuries of struggle of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Asia, and Africa to move towards independence and liberation from various colonising powers. Together with strategic military concerns and geopolitical interests, the main motive for the colonisers was economic, facilitated by the establishment of ‘free’ labour in the form of slavery, which was abolished in all the colonies in the 19th century and replaced largely by indentured labour. This entry traces the reason the role of children, like that of women, has been mainly invisible, downplayed, and underresearched, and that is internalised patriarchal colonial subjectivity. Like the ‘native,’ children are colonised, in need of development, and without political agency, hence in the context of childhood, the terms coloniser and colonised take on a ...