To move forward uncertainly, from side to side, as one carrying the
white man's burden. (From zed , z , and jag , an Icelandic word of unknown meaning.)
There had been a remand, then assurances on the part of a harassed father, and the young man had gone out to bear the
White Man's Burden overseas.
His poem "The
White Man's Burden" sums up his imperialism--the creed that it is the duty of the higher races to civilize the lower ones with a strong hand; and he never doubts that the greater part of this obligation rests at present upon England--a theory, certainly, to which history lends much support.
Once the Viet Minh forces, under the leadership of the legendary general Vo Nguyen Giap, had dealt a death blow to the French colonial forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the Eisenhower administration in Washington effectively decided to take on the
white man's burden. Vietnam was divided, but that very year's Geneva agreement proposed reunification elections.
The
White man's burden of colonialism still continues to create inequality, poverty and intergenerational grief in the lands that were supposedly civilised.
This new ideology is in many ways repeating the moral certainties of the missionaries and those who promoted the '
White Man's Burden' from the last century.
That Prithwi Narayan was a local chieftain that resisted the
white man's burden to colonize and civilize the east is being taken up as a cause by none less than Nepalis.
Civilising the people around the world was "The
White Man's Burden".
'The
White Man's Burden' was a claim to spread peace, love and justice without actually doing so.
They exhibited signs of being totally enervated bearing the '
white man's burden' through those days of strife and fearful odds.
GHISLAINE ALLEYNE: What is the significance of placing Rudyard Kipling's poem "The
White Man's Burden" at the opening of your book?
Accordingly, taking the allusion to the '
white man's burden' as a thread, the present article divides into three parts.