by Dr. KWELI NZITO
Imperialists continue to exercise control of former colonies from the comfort of their metropolises as their former subjects appear resigned to their post-colonial fates.
“The budding stages of colonialism witnessed the quick obliteration of indigenous languages for formal communication.”
Europe outweighs other powers in the colonization and subjugation of peoples in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Australasia. Beginning with the voyages of “discovery” at the zenith of Spanish maritime power in the 15th century, followed by Portugal, Britain, France, Holland and to a lesser extent, Italy, Germany and Belgium, the foundations were being laid for the four essentials (the 4 C’s) constituting the moral justification for an ambitious project of European colonialism and hegemony: “Civilization”, Confiscation (of resources of the colonized), Christianity and Commandeering (of the identities of colonial subjects). The undertaking meted out generous servings of brutality of genocidal proportions and derogation of natives in colonized lands, variably termed savages, brutes, barbarians — anything but human.
Classic colonialism was a massive project that generated states of mutually exclusive otherness between colonizer and colonized, the “us vs them” paradigm that defined the lopsided relationship between victor and vanquished. The paradigm spawned narratives that constituted reference points for bondage, murder, theft, derision and narrative appropriation. Subsequently native self-loathing emerged as greater numbers of colonized subjects were recruited into colonial education systems.Colonized subjects arose whose culture was a farrago of native and Western norms, straddled precariously between the two ethos, in reality belonging to neither. Inculcation of colonial attitudes to select individuals among the vanquished was integral to the subjugation of the colonized, initially achieved via orchestrated armed interventions, territorial appropriation, followed by education, imposition of colonial languages as formal languages of administration along with proselytizing. The latter strategy efficiently camouflaged colonial rule to lend a non-violent and an ostensibly more divine face to conquest. Today’s megachurches and evangelical proselytizing originating in the Bible Belt are inseparable from America’s imperial and racist faces.
“Native self-loathing emerged as greater numbers of colonized subjects were recruited into colonial education systems.”
Organized religion’s power to subvert former colonial subjects is richly demonstrated in Africa where Nigerian and Kenyan evangelical converts openly prayed for Trump to emerge victorious in the ongoing electoral circus. Trump’s labeling Africa a sh*thole continent did little to dissuade the converts from praying for the electoral success of their racist nemesis. Neither did Africa’s own history of dispossession, theft, enslavement and appropriation of their natural resources by former colonizers or current imperial powers deter African tourists from visiting the holy land in anticipation of the coming triumph of racist Zionists in fulfillment of Biblical “prophesies” and the impending “rapture.” Such a surge of African tourists did not parallel their preference for internal tourism in their own homelands.
Black Agenda Report for more