First Project (Colonialism Brochure)

The thing I decided to do for my project was to cover the overarching theme of colonialism that can be found in any piece of literature that we have read so far. The idea of a brochure came to me because I thought it would be funny if a group of colonizing soliders handed out cheesy pamplets that resemble the type of pamplets that parents might give their kid about the harshness of drugs. The first page resembles that idea and shows a British Flah due to the fact that Britain was one of main colonizing nations. The second page shows how a nation tries to implement their ideas on the people that inhabit the location. The nation originally states that everything is done to help the inhabitants and depending on the nation, if the inhabitants refuse things tend to get violent. The final page is of religion more importantly Christianity. A lot of conquests through history has been though the justification of spreading the all mighty word of God, even if the inhabitants already had a god. Even if the groups weren’t colonizing the area. they were sending missionaries to spread the same word.

Colonialism often leads to another popular trade of the time and it happens to be the slave trade. Many explorers went to brand new areas of the world to find and steal inhabitants and then sell them as slaves. We see this treatment in Equiano when men came to Equianos homeland and kidnap the Equinao and his sister to then sell. The irony of this is that Equiano didn’t first note that anything was truly wrong due to his culture and slaves. In his culture, slaves are villagers that broke the law and their punishment is that they have to serve a master, normally one that is high of power. So when he sees the treatment of the slaves at first he is almost taken back about the the nice treatment. Of course this changes when he gets to his new owner and he starts to see the true horror.

To thoroughly explain this project, lets first observe the cover. As I mentioned above, the first page is designed to resemble a cheesy pamphlet that a parent of supervisor might hand to a child about the harshness of drugs, safe sex procedures, or might even resemble the pamphlets that some politicians hand out to endorse themselves. I’m sure we can all picture a time in our life where have at least seen one of those pamphlets may it even be in a doctors waiting room. Everything about those pamphlets influenced the design of the cover down to the color choice. They normally have bright welcoming colors such as a blue or purple to try and pull you in. The white text enforces that welcoming feeling. These color choices however change when we get to the next page.

When observing the next page there are some prominent features that may jump out at you. The first being the color choice. The choice of red text was influenced by the commanding presence that the color red holds. It not only grabs your attention, but helps show that you mean business by showing some dominance. The choice of a black background was to further help the red pop out more to the reader. The picture in the middle of course is a thumbs up as almost a reassuring gesture that everything is fine when in reality, its not.

Finally as I covered previously, the final page is the final nail in the coffin when it comes to colonialism, and that is the enforcement of a new religion. When colonizing a new nation, you first have to take over the land from the previous inhabitants. If you want to make sure that their presence is pretty much erased, what better way then to take their religion away, replacing every little thing about their culture until yours remains.