Brother KZS,
--
There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.
---Mohandas Gandhi
-- You make some valid points but you tendentiously mar these points with hyperbole, wild generalizations, and untenable analogies. Do you really want us to take you seriously when you compare Christian missionaries in Africa to Nazis? Come on!
Where then do we place African American missionaries in colonial Kenya, colonial South Africa, and in "Leopold's" Congo, especially those who were responsible for exposing Leopold's crimes against the Congolese peoples to the world? Where they all complicit in this Christian missionary brainwashing of, and violence against, Africans?
It is great that your wife is Chamba. My forthcoming book (to be released next month by Indiana), has sections that discuss how a particular white missionary (who was understandably widely despised by the British colonial authorities, who even threatened him) consciously motivated Christian Chamba young men to take on the colonial system, especially the Anglo-Fulani system of colonial rule, which your wife may be very familiar with. Yes, said missionary probably had his own anti-Muslim agenda, but this alliance between European Christian missionaries and Christian converts in the Middle Belt fueled the anticolonial and anti-Caliphate self determination struggles of many non-Muslim peoples across the Middle Belt. It would be insulting to your wife's folks--your in-laws--to dismiss this struggle. Go to these places, including your wife's area today, and ask them how they feel about the missionaries. They'd probably tell you, even if romantically, that the missionaries saved them from the worst effects of colonial rule, helped them to challenge both colonial rule and the oppression of British-appointed Fulani imperial chiefs and agents. Where do you place this story in your Manichean, blanket denunciation of European missionary work as bad for Africans? And would it not amount to scholarly arrogance on your part to simply parse this complex story of missionary education, militant self-determination, and colonialism as yet another instance of double consciousness and brainwashing by missionaries? Sometimes as scholars we need to humble ourselves and listen to our non-elite subjects. We may come away realizing that our ossified paradigms and ideologies mean nothing to African people at the grassroots. I'd rather the faithful to how African groups interpret their colonial experiences than squeeze these experiences into some prepackaged ideological boxes. I do much of my research in Muslim Northern Nigeria and I have read things about the British written by Muslim colonial subjects that would embarrass and shock Afrocentrists, pan-Africanists, and those with similar ideologies. It is not that these people didn't see colonial oppression; they did. But they also saw other things. Some of them saw beyond colonial oppression into other realms. Any serious historian of Africa knows that colonial and postcolonial African history is not just about colonial oppression. To make such an argument is to lionize, reify, and imbue colonialism with deterministic powers that it lacked in reality. Some folks write about colonialism as though Africans did nothing else in colonial times except suffer and react to colonial oppression.
The truth is that Africans used the tools and technologies provided by missionaries for their own ends--to secure education, which gave one a more secure economic foothold in colonial society; to acquire the accoutrements of colonial modernity; to access the limited spaces and opportunities for upward mobility open to Africans; and to participate in national and transnational anticolonial movements and solidarities.
I'm usually the first to rail against complexity for complexity's sake. In fact on this forum I have often critiqued the obsession with complexity as something that sometimes authorizes and legitimizes complicity. But much of human history is complex, and there is nothing wrong with acknowledging the nuances and complexities of African colonial history. One is merely being faithful to the narratives of the Africans who experienced colonialism in MULTIPLE and DIVERSE ways.
Colonialism was never uniform. When it came to brutality, there was a spectrum, ranging from Leopold in the Congo and the Germans in present day Namibia to Apartheid to non-Apatheid settler colonies to the Indirect Rule colonies where colonial authorities for a variety of reasons adopted a relatively hands-off attitude, leading some scholars like Jeffery Herbst to argue about the chronically limited reach of the colonial state and others like Wilson to write about the "thin white line" of colonial control, which meant that many Africans in some colonies did not even experience colonial rule in any practical quotidian sense because of the thinness of the colonial presence. When it came to "cotton colonialism" is it fair to lump the quasi slavery of the Portuguese cotton plantation system with the harsh but tamer cotton regimes of the French Soudan? Or to obscure the difference between the French Soudan cotton regime as analyzed by Allen Isaacman and the British cotton regime in Northern Nigeria, a regime that, while harsh and imposed, was no where as brutal as that in the Portuguese empire? Was the colonial exploitation, resource expropriation, and economic disenfranchisement of non-settler colonies as intense as those of settler colonies where Africans' lands were seized, master-servant labor laws passed, pass laws implemented, and Africans prohibited from growing crops deemed profitable by the settler planter oligarchy? I could go on with the examples of marked differences in colonial practices resulting in marked differences in how colonialism was experienced and responded to by Africans.
Further, when Emmanuel Ayandele and our own Toyin Falola write eloquently about the "missionary impact" on African nationalism (or African elite nationalism), is that not merely a recognition of the UNINTENDED consequences of European missionary Christianity, which manifested in two forms? The two forms being that the racism practiced in missionary organizations raised African converts racial and nationalist consciousness, leading to activism, and also that having acquired the Roman literacy dispensed by the missions, African Christian colonial subjects (Athomi, in Simon Gikandi's Kikuyu vocabulary) used this tool of literacy to transgress the intellectual boundaries erected for them, deployed some of the acquired moral and theological vocabularies of liberation, brotherhood, and equality to question colonial policies and to eventually challenge for independence. Was this strategy of inversing colonial and missionary logics and idioms to fight colonialism not a demonstration of African agency and political genius? Would this particular strategy have been available without the educational resources that missionary provided, albeit for their own purposes?
I'd like to make a point in response to the repeated emphasis on colonial violence, a point which basically repeats an argument I make in my first book. When it came to colonial violence, it had a limit--it had to have a limit. It was, had to be, finite violence, for you did not want to kill off or render incapacitated the same Africans who had to be recruited to work for you or who had to grow the raw materials you so desired. So, yes, colonial violence could not have been and was not absolute or total--not because the Europeans weren't capable of inflicting total violence or practiced moral restrain but because they were pragmatic, rational, self-interested economists who realized that colonial violence only had to perform a corrective, punitive, and deterrence function and that colonial brutality had to stop at precisely the point beyond which violence could undermine colonial economic and political goals and become counterproductive. Which is precisely why the German system in Southwest Africa (Namibia), the Leopoldian system in the Congo, and Portuguese cotton slavery in Angola, Mozambique and elsewhere, were abandoned in favor of what Fred Cooper calls "respectable colonial exploitation." The other European colonialists feigned outrage at these early genocidal colonial practices not because they were innocent but because Leopold and the Germans were giving colonialism a bad name in Europe and imperiling everyone's colonial interests, causing a PR disaster, but more importantly, destroying the very humanity and resources that were needed to sustain colonial exploitation over a long time. To preserve and renew the resources that colonial authorities were interested in, they had to move away from the Leopoldian style and colonial exploitation had to become slower, more systematic, and less destructive of that which produced the raw materials--the land and people of Africa. This was how the doctrine of Dual Mandate was born. It was half propaganda, half economic and political pragmatism. Excessive violence threatened colonial exploitation, thus violence, when used, had to be measured, targeted, and calculated to achieve a finite purpose. Achille Mbembe makes a similar argument about colonial violence, so I am not the only one who has posited this. To preserve and reproduce much needed African labor colonial authorities, after the genocides and scorched earth destructions of the early colonial years, realized that you couldn't kill off the Africans you expect to offer you their labor or to produce your raw materials, so they moved away from the German Herero/Nama system, although episodic returns to wanton brutality did occur.
So, to conclude, I don't object to complicating aspects of African history or politics that lend themselves to complexity and nuance, even though I am suspicious of efforts to use complexity to hide complicity or to muddy the waters of straightforward moral or analytical issues. Colonialism was a complex thing, as was Africans' relationship with, and experience of, it. Instead of imposing an ideologically motivated moral polemic on it, instead of homogenizing complex experiences of colonial oppression, and instead of using sharp binary oppositions to oversimplify this experience, I think it is more rewarding to understand it in all its nuances, contradictions, and complexities. Only by listening to Africans who experienced colonialism and missionary Christianity would we fully grasp the range of actions and reactions that Africans undertook to work the colonial system in their favor and for their purposes, and to make the best of an oppressive system. Reducing these experiences and the narratives that flow from them to brainwashing, double consciousness, or the Stockholm syndrome is just that--reductive.
On Thu, Jan 2, 2014 at 10:46 PM, kwame zulu shabazz <kwameshabazz@gmail.com> wrote:
Peace, Brother Pablo.
Yes, there are many examples of racism burnished with bogus ambiguity. The example that has always stuck in my head is Elmina Castle in the Central Region of Ghana. There is a plaque on the site which basically says that colonialism was bad, but also good because it introduced Africans to Christ, new crops, western education, and, best of all, Europeans put the brakes on African "tribalism" and, thus, thankfully for the savages, Africans were forced to stop fighting one another. Or Boston College where my wife did her first of two advanced degrees in theology. A fellow graduate student from Central Africa (I think), insisted that she (my wife) must have a "Christian name." I also have in mind accounts of missionary schools that imposed European names and/or European languages, sometimes with physical violence. Here is an example of imposed Euro names from Long Walk to Freedom cited in:Indigenous Peoples' Wisdom and Power: Affirming Our Knowledge Through Narratives (p. 234)
This thread, I think, was a response to an earlier post written in the NY Times by a Jewish scholar who wants to make the case that missionary schools weren't so bad because they produced anti-colonial leaders. I won't rehash my critique of that here, but I do find it offensive (and false). Now I might be wrong, but I doubt that Jewish scholars are inclined to claiming that Nazi institutions weren't all bad because, after all, Jews eventually got their own state. (Slightly aside, it seems to me that Jews aren't blamed for their oppression even though some Jews cooperated with Nazis. Africans, on the other hand, don't get the same benefit of the historiographical doubt).To my thinking what Europeans did to Africans in the "New World" and in Africans in Africa are impossible to disentangle. These were interconnected processes. And, yes, Islam is also problematic. I am thinking of my Fulani friend who boasts that her people have been Muslims for so long that they no longer know their indigenous names and she dismisses indigenous religion as "backwards."We won't agree on "complexity" on this thread (and that is ok). I doubt that the Namibians slaughtered by Germans gave much thought to complexity. In some cases, too many cases I fear, "complexity" is a scholarly conceit that obscures more than it explains or, rather, explains the surface of things whilst missing the deeper pattern of uncomplicated brutality. As far as I can tell, people who resist their oppressors don't waste much time pondering the "complexity" of their condition. What they did far more often is carefully assess the words and deeds of their oppressors, looked out for contradiction, and astutely exploit those contradictions to press the case for freedom, justice and equality. The Bostonian abolitionist David Walker's scathing critique of white slave-owning Christians comes to mind. Or the prophetess Kimpa Vita of Kongo who remixed Portuguese Christianity to create a revolutionary religion of African redemption.kzsAs for funding, it is not complicated. In so long as we are dependent on European funds to produce scholarly knowledge about Africa, we are compromised (and colonized).
By the way, how can you possibly say that colonialism imposed European names upon Africans? Most Africans have African names; some chose (as did my grandfathers on both sides of my family0; yet, as you and your Nigerian wife knows, they continued to use their own ethnic names; where they did, chose (or have imposed upon them a European, or, biblical names--Islam is another matter), they, or their parents, chose names that reflected their own aspirations about their children's future. What happened in the diasporas, is, of course another matter to be sure. My father, Moses, an East German trained, Marxist agronomist, loved baptist hymns, and which we sung at his funeral. So what? It's complex, brother; real complex.
As to the Gestapo (if that is the appropriate analogy; I take you mean Nazism, as the Gestapo was the secret police), I'd like to know what you know about the "Jewish" scholarship of Nazism to make that statement, at least about Nazism, and that it was not complex, unless you mean that there can be no morally complex responses to it-- that it is an unmitigated evil, etc. Surely, a point is that colonialism was complex as were its legacies; altruism, or otherwise, has nothing to do with it. That Nazism is an evil is beyond dispute; that it was complex is also not beyond dispute, but is this the point of analogy that you want to proceed with?
kzsOn Jan 2, 2014, at 9:19 PM, Pablo Idahosa wrote:Brother Kwame,
I realize that short statements and responses do not make for subtlety and nuance, and I would not want you to write an essay here, no more than I intend to write one in response! However, when you say that we ought not to find in colonialism complexity and ambiguity, I take it you mean that it is not complex because it was imposed and often acted with brutality, even genocidally in a number of cases; imposed norms and values that were not endogenous to Africa (i.e. Eurocentric); left pernicious political, social and, economic legacies that Africans continue to live and wrestle with. I feel that ambiguity is another matter, as here I take it you mean a standpoint about colonialism's processes and institutions and their cultural religious cognates, like missions.
By the way, how can you possibly say that colonialism imposed European names upon Africans? Most Africans have African names; some chose (as did my grandfathers on both sides of my family0; yet, as you and your Nigerian wife knows, they continued to use their own ethnic names; where they did, chose (or have imposed upon them a European, or, biblical names--Islam is another matter), they, or their parents, chose names that reflected their own aspirations about their children's future. What happened in the diasporas, is, of course another matter to be sure. My father, Moses, an East German trained, Marxist agronomist, loved baptist hymns, and which we sung at his funeral. So what? It's complex, brother; real complex.
As to the Gestapo (if that is the appropriate analogy; I take you mean Nazism, as the Gestapo was the secret police), I'd like to know what you know about the "Jewish" scholarship of Nazism to make that statement, at least about Nazism, and that it was not complex, unless you mean that there can be no morally complex responses to it-- that it is an unmitigated evil, etc. Surely, a point is that colonialism was complex as were its legacies; altruism, or otherwise, has nothing to do with it. That Nazism is an evil is beyond dispute; that it was complex is also not beyond dispute, but is this the point of analogy that you want to proceed with?
Finally, we can or we can choose not to be shackled by funding; it's a circular, imprisoning argument, as everything way say or do is taken in evidence against that which we say that, to you, appears to be "western", or at least a double consciousness. What would not be Eurocentric that might be sufficient in a a discussion about the complexities of colonialism?
Best,Kwame Zulu Shabazz
Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies
Department of Social Sciences
203-A Coltrane Hall
Winston-Salem State Univ.
601 S. MLK Jr. Dr.
Winston-Salem, NC 27110
Phone: 336-750-8940
Email: shabazzkz@wssu.edu
==
"Every artist, every scientist, must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of the greatest of man's literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of racial and national superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. The struggle invades the formerly cloistered halls of our universities and other seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear." Paul Robeson--
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There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.
---Mohandas Gandhi
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