The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews Sebastian, Four Mothers, Restless, and The Most Precious of Cargoes
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Lessons in decolonisation
Education is key to Indigenous progress in Bolivia, and the racist, US-backed white elite cannot turn the tide, writes GAVIN O’TOOLE
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The Lettered Indian: Race, Nation, and Indigenous Education in Twentieth-Century Bolivia
by Brooke Larson
Duke University Press, £25.99
THE US-backed right-wing coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia in 2019 and the violent turmoil fanned by the white elite that both predated and followed it demonstrated above all else that, for this country’s Indigenous majority, there is much unfinished business.
Jeanine Anez, the usurper who, with the support of the military, all but installed herself — now jailed for her political crimes and facing genocide charges — epitomises the racism at the heart of the imperial legacy, wont as she is to describe Bolivia’s Indigenous majority as “savages.”
No matter where you stand on mistakes made by Morales’s Movement for Socialism (MAS), to a large extent the coup represented a white, racist reaction to the prospect of the country’s first Indigenous president of Bolivia remaining in power after 13 years.
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