Colonial Legacies

The Ambiguities of Colonialism

After seventy-five years of colonial rule African independence in the 1960s was for most a new experience, but the quest for freedom was as old as colonialism itself. During the nineteenth century Europeans had occupied vast sections of the African continent—Boer and Briton in South Africa, the Portuguese holding Mozambique and Angola, French and English interests nibbling at enclaves along the western coast from Cape Verde to the Niger Delta, then the final rush of occupation that followed the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. African resistance had been various, sometimes intense, sometimes confused, and ultimately impotent in the face of superior Western military technology. With the eventual establishment of colonial administrations, opposition was forced into such refinements as independent African churches, political movements masquerading as cultural organizations, or token representation in colonial legislative bodies. At the same time there were Africans who welcomed colonialism or at least resigned themselves to foreign domination, arguing that Africa could learn much from the outsiders, modernizing their economic and political institutions in preparation for the time when African societies might take their place in the world community of nations.

Thus, during the colonial era, an ambivalence developed among many Africans, particularly those familiar with the West, an ambivalence in which an admiration for Western ideas and institutions clashed with traditional African ethical and social standards. If this raised confusion and uncertainty in the minds of those Africans who regarded the worlds of Europe and Africa as antithetical, to others it promised a happy integration of complementary cultures, brought into being by those Africans familiar with both worlds. When political independence arrived in mid-twentieth-century Africa, the ambivalence of colonial times remained to complicate the pressing problems of new nations—how to convert the artificial geography of European colonies into stable, cohesive nations, how to turn the benefits of economic growth from Western profit to African advantage, how to assert a genuinely African culture in the modern world.

Antecedents1

Ambivalence was not the hallmark of the Europeans who came to Africa. Portuguese clerics along the coasts of Kongo and Angola baptized slaves bound for the Americas, serene in the conviction that the outward-bound chattels had been rescued from the eternal damnation of their seeming barbarism. Dutch settlers arriving in South Africa during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries felt no remorse as they decimated indigenous hunters and herdsmen while appropriating the lands of those they regarded as inferior beings. In West Africa the nineteenth century opened as European, chiefly British, humanitarians mounted a major attack on the Atlantic slave trade, an essential component of which was the replacement of pagan, slave-trading societies with Christianized cultivators of those agricultural commodities in growing demand in the West. The coastal towns of Freetown, Monrovia, and Libreville were all founded as rehabilitation centers for former slaves, but the reforming impulse extended well beyond resettlement, involving no less than a new look for the whole of West Africa's traditional civilizations.

In communities like Saint-Louis at the mouth of the Senegal River, the dominant French presence was marked by what came to be called assimilation, that is, the total conversion of indigenous peoples to European culture, at least in its Gallic variation. Africans who came under British influence were subjected, like the former slaves of Freetown, to Anglican Christianity and the ethical, cultural, and social standards of Victorian England. The objective was not colonies but the establishment of independent communities directed by an African middle class of farmers, artisans, and traders—a clearly superior alternative, it was argued, to economies based primarily on the sale of surplus population. As with the French, the British effort was essentially assimilationist, an early instance of Western technical assistance, and a genuine effort to remake indigenous societies in the image of what was regarded without question in Europe as the most advanced civilization the world had yet achieved.

As exercises in cultural persuasion these efforts were not an immediate success. Tropical disease took a heavy toll among the missionaries and government officials posted to West Africa, while local populations remained largely indifferent to alien ways and religious beliefs. Nevertheless, small and significant gains were made. European ideas and institutions took root gradually in coastal points like Goree, Cape Coast, Accra, and Lagos, these cosmopolitan centers serving as seed ground for the dissemination of Western values and standards that percolated into the interior, carried by the shifting African population migrating ceaselessly between town and country.

Some Africans actively sought to acquire and master the elements of Western culture. There were those attracted by European technology, not only the evident advantages of mechanical contrivances but scientific, mathematical, and linguistic skills as well. These inroads led naturally to other imports such as personal dress, housing, and, of course, religion. In Senegal a small métis, or mulatto, population—descendants of European-African alliances—embraced the language and culture that France had hoped to implant in her African holdings. At Freetown the liberated slaves who poured in during the first half of the nineteenth century were quickly attracted to the Western culture they found in their new home. Torn loose from familiar surroundings, the new arrivals accepted Christian conversion, sent their children to be educated in the mission schools, mastered English, adopted forms of European dress, and settled down as aspirant bourgeois tradesmen, clergy, or schoolteachers. If the transformation was not as complete as among the métis of Senegal, the movement was clearly in the direction of a Western way of life.

The growing influence of European culture was exemplified in the careers of a number of West Africans, some self-made men sympathetic to the drive of Western enterprise and acquisitiveness, others singled out by European missionaries for special training in such fields as education, medicine, or the ministry. These acolytes helped staff a...