By Golden Guvamatanga
APART from Christianity, there is arguably no subject that has had much discussion, deliberation and analysis as that of colonialism.
There is too much sophistication surrounding neo-colonialism so much so that detecting it might be a difficult task.
In order to fully understand colonialism, there is compelling need to unpack it as the entity that it is.
Osterhammel (1997) contends that ‘colonisation’ is a process of territorial acquisition; ‘colony’, a particular type of socio-political organisation; and ‘colonialism’, a system of domination.
While the general description of colonialism almost always points towards political control, the inescapable reality is that it is a well-organised, well-structured and well thought out project whose strength has always lay in the control of the mind of the colonised.
Control of the mind involves subtle coercion of the intended target to first abandon their culture, tradition and beliefs in place of other systems, chief among them Christianity.
After Christianity, then comes education which seals the fate of the colonised.
The system of domination may involves physical force as was the case with Zimbabwe where colonialists used brute force to push locals away from prime land to arid lands.
The socio-political organisation involves packing locals into unproductive lands as what happened through the Native Reserves Order in Council (1898). The Order created the infamous native Reserves established for blacks only.
The process of domination emerges when the colonialists set up legislation to govern their colony.
The following passage in Two Thousand Seasons written by Ayi Kwei Armah aptly captures the subtle manner in which colonialism weakens the mind of the colonised.
It buttresses the notion that colonialism is not clumsy, but a project that has its own formidable structures designed to trap their targets in a prison they cannot escape.
This is called the prison of the mind.
“The capture of the mind and the body both is a slavery far longer lasting, far more secure than the conquest of bodies alone. The predators consistently reduced these men first to beasts, then to things — beasts they could command, things they could manipulate, all in the increase in their power over us. To reduce them to beasts the predators starved their minds… To reduce them to things the predators fed their bodies, indulging their crassest physical wants promptly, overflowing. A mind attacked and conquered is guided easily away from the paths of its own soul.”
Colonialists put in place a system to colonise Africans that began by starving the mind of critical issues and matters of life.
Once a mind cannot think outside the box, it can only look up to the one who paralysed it for salvation.
Young (2001) described colonialism as a project that “…involved an extraordinary range of different forms and practices carried out with respect to radically different cultures, over many centuries.”
In other words, colonialism is enshrined in the systematic annihilation of political, social and cultural values that formed states in the pre-colonial era.
Their ideas, ideals and values are washed away and replaced by more concerted ones in a very subtle manner.
This is why it is important to first look at the roots of colonialism when analysing the subject.
It all started with the ‘Scramble for Africa’.
The Scramble for Africa was the invasion and annexation of African territory by Europeans during 1881 to 1914.
The event is also called the ‘Partition of Africa’ or the ‘Conquest of Africa’.
In 1870, 10 percent of Africa was under European control.
By 1914, close to 90 percent of the continent was under colonialism. Then there was the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, which regulated European settler colonisation and trade in Africa.
According to Wikipedia, the Berlin Conference, “…ushered in a period of heightened colonial activity by European powers, which eliminated or overrode most existing boundaries. Colonialism was introduced across nearly all the continent.”
The claim by whites was to ‘civilise’ Africa.
The book by Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, is important in understanding the strategy employed by colonialists to colonise Africa, especially in the context of missionaries.
Just like they did in Zimbabwe and in the Congo, their role was to weaken the mind of the African using Christianity which was presented as a superior religion.
But Christianity was designed to subdue Africans and weaken their resistance to colonialism. The missionaries were sent as an advance party to Africa to pave way for colonialists.
In Africa, they dismissed the ways and traditions of the indigenes, describing them as evil.
In the words of Father Wolf Schmidt:
λ To Page 18
λ From Page 16
“The early missionaries did not differentiate between their faith and their own culture.”
Christianity was introduced in North Africa as early as the First Century AD, but it was only in the late 19th Century, when colonialism was advancing, that Christianity seriously increased its presence in Africa.
In what later became Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, the first mission station was opened at Inyathi, close to Bulawayo, in 1859 by the London Missionary Society through Reverend Robert Moffat. Norman Hetherington in Mission and Empire quotes a chaplain of British East India Company who traded with India and the rest of East Asia as saying: “We’ve annihilated the political importance of the natives, stripped them of their power and laid them prostrate, without giving them anything in return.”
The Christianity strategy is also aptly captured in Things Fall Apart: “Whenever Mr. Brown went to Umuofia, he spent long hours with Akunna in his obi talking about religion through an interpreter. However, neither of them succeeded in winning the other to their belief, but they did learn more about their dissimilar faiths”
What we learn from the above passage is that winning over one’s religion is the most critical stage of colonialism.
The Congo case is important in this regard.
At the end of the 19th century, King Leopold II of Belgium convinced his government to take over the Congo Basin.
This what King Leopold said in part to missionaries that were to initiate the colonisation process:
“REVERENDS, Fathers and Dear Compatriots:
The task that is given to fulfill is very delicate and requires much tact.
You will go certainly to evangelise, but your evangelisation must inspire above all Belgium interests.
Your principal objective in our mission in the Congo is never to teach the niggers to know God, this they know already.
They speak and submit to a Mungu, one Nzambi, one Nzakomba, and what else I don’t know.
They know that to kill, to sleep with someone else’s wife, to lie and to insult is bad.
Have courage to admit it; you are not going to teach them what they know already.
Your essential role is to facilitate the task of administrators and industrials, which means you will go to interpret the gospel in the way it will be the best to protect your interests in that part of the world. For these things, you have to keep watch on disinteresting our savages from the richness that is plenty.”
In the book titled King Leopold’s Ghost—A story of greed, terror and heroism in colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild, published in 1998, we are presented with the most horrific and gruesome history of the Congo.
Such detailed account had so far been hidden or suppressed. It had never been fully taught in schools in Africa.
The only way the Congolese knew about the past was through oral history.
Hochschild wrote that, “between 1885 and 1908, there were between five and eight million victims of King Leopold II’s personal rule, under a barbarous system of forced labour and systematic terror.”
In the introduction to the book, Hochschild wrote that, “unlike other great predators of history, from Genghis Khan to the Spanish conquistadors, King Leopold II never saw a drop of blood spilt…he never set foot in the Congo. There is something very modern about that, too, as there is about the bomber pilot in the stratosphere, above the clouds, who never hears screams or sees shattered homes or torn flesh.”
When the process of colonialism ended the colonialists were not done with their colonies.
They embarked on a project to capture the minds of blacks through education.
Once subjected to Western education, Africans became compliant beings serving the interests of the master.
In the book Decolonising the Mind, Ngugi wa Thiong’o highlights the victim’s sorry state wrought by Western education.
“Berlin of 1884 was effected through the sword and the bullet. But the night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard. The physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom. But where the former was visibly brutal, the latter was visibly gentle. The bullet was the means of physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation”.
Currently Zimbabwe still uses colonial names and even colonial language that makes it difficult to manoeuvre from the challenges associated with colonialism.
We call ourselves a Christian nation simply on the basis of the Bible that was brought to us by whites.
The academic education purposely did not train Africans for the higher level positions of colonial administrations, which were mostly reserved for Europeans a practice which created dependency on the colonisers, as without them the colony did not have qualified administrators.
Conclusively, the most difficult thing is to pinpoint the remnants of colonialism especially in the context of the contradictory behaviours that victims of colonialism exhibit.
As long as the infrastructure of colonialism is still intact it is difficult for the victim to escape from their reality.