This is particularly pernicious and damaging to native peoples as they are usually made to vacate their native territories in a process that involves violence aimed at community and cultural destruction up to and including complete genocide.

This includes making far-reaching and often permanent changes to the physical landscape, changing the place names, introducing new plant and animal types, destroying native languages, destroying scared sites, inventing fake and racist histories, genetic interference with the native through rape, and sexual slavery, and many other acts that seriously undermine the native ability to survive or even recover from their settler presence.

In the modern era especially, settlers have often been brought in by an imperial colonizing power. They may or may not be of the same race as the rulers of the imperial power, but are beholden to them for favors in physical security, and economic programmes always to the detriment of the Natives. But first and foremost, the colony is about land. Settlers invariably hold the same views of their own racial or even religious superiority over the natives, that the imperial power holds, and feel entitled to special treatment, especially on matters of resource allocation.

Sometimes, settlers develop strong differences of opinion with the imperial headquarters over the management and future direction of the colony. At the extreme, this can lead to armed revolts in which the settlers seek to throw off imperial control, and manage the colony for themselves. DATES Famous examples of this are the United States of America’s war for Independence against Britain, and the Unilateral Declaration of Independence by the last settler regime of Zimbabwe (then still calling itself Rhodesia, after Cecil Rhodes, the British diamond magnate who created it).

It is important to note that these revolts are aimed at obtaining greater economic and political freedom for the settlers only, and not to liberate the natives, or return their lands and culture to them. At heart, the colony remains a colony as far as the still dispossessed native is concerned.