Colonialism Lives! (Part One)

The title is not quite fair. I want to discuss colonialism only tangentially, but the headline, “Colonialism Lives” is a fair one. My thesis is simple: Like almost everyone before us, we measure other people and cultures throughout space and time by our own values and on our own terms, however unfair that evaluation is, and we would understand our world better and that each other more rightly if we would stop doing so.

I understand Colonialism as a political construct in which technologically stronger societies occupy technologically weaker societies and force the latter to live on the former’s terms. I grew up in a British Colony, Southern Rhodesia as it was then called. I was born in its near neighbour, Northern Rhodesia. Today these countries are Zambia and Zimbabwe. They run their own affairs, free of the colonial yoke, but they are not free of their colonial past. One can observe the negative results of colonization in modern Zambia and Zimbabwe in a variety of ways.

We live in a post-colonial age. I am not sure all the implications of this statement. I take it to be a reversal of the Euro-centric view of the world common to the North American academy of my youth. In my high school days, we were taught history as a construct of White European society, and especially a construct of White men. Today, we view history more fully, seeking perspectives from a variety of ethnic and political sources, and looking again at the old stories to discern women’s voices as well as other voices that were ignored in the old tellings of those stories.

I remember the way that the stories of the founding of Rhodesia were told in my youth. Because I am a White male, I heard stories about how “Europeans” and especially European men settled Rhodesia in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The stories assumed that European society – which meant especially English society – was the pinnacle of progress within the evolutionary scheme. It was taken for granted that Black Zimbabweans (whom we called “Africans”) would want to become like us. Those White politicians of the 1950s who thought that Africans could join White society were seen as liberal, but of course their liberalism still assumed that White European Men should run the whole show.

The story of how the colonial period came to an end is a long story, which we can read in many other places. I note just one small piece of what helped to bring it to an end. The biggest piece, of course, was the fact that Black Zimbabweans knew that their country needed to be liberated from White dominance. Others have told that story at length, throughout the countries of what was British Africa.[1]

The smaller piece I refer to is the rise of what we call postmodernism, and especially the way that modernism and postmodernism combined to undermine belief in absolutes.[2] When I was a university student, the rejection of absolutes was in full flow. I went to a Christian College (Messiah College), which stood against that flow, but we all lived fully in the events of the 1960s, when the Baby Boomers sought to put the era of wars behind and to usher in the Age of Aquarius.

We sang songs like “All you need is love”. We marched against authority figures, feeling that they were destroying the earth. We preached an ethics of relativity, in which the seeking self stood above the fray of absolute values and absolute authorities, synonyms in our mind with totalitarianism. [All of this is, of course, potted history – my own impressions of living through that time – and I hope that I am not misrepresenting the picture too much.]

In the early days of the 1960s, John Kennedy could say, in his inaugural address, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” There was a great deal of idealism in our rebellion, and we responded – in the Peace Corps, for example. But there was also a great deal of simple self-centeredness in our rebellion. In the 1970s and 1980s, the call for love gave way to getting married (and divorced), pursuing careers, raising our own children, and generally living out the implications of having rejected absolute values.

Jean Twenge has described the results in Generation Me. Her concern is less with my note of absolute and relative values and more with the loss of other-centeredness in a self-centered age. My contention, however, is that, by abandoning absolutes in our worldviews, we have escorted imperialism and colonialism out the front door and they have sneaked again by the back door.

[To be continued]

[1] See the work of people like Eliakim Sibanda writing on the history of ZAPU, or Wendy Urban-Mead on the history of the BIC in Zimbabwe, or the writings more generally of Terence Ranger (as a historian of Zimbabwe) and of John and Jean Comaroff (social historians, setting missionary work in southern Africa in its colonial setting). I assume that the reader can google these sources and do not give further information here.

[2] There are many sources for understanding modernism and postmodernism. Within my own discipline, I can recommend Paul Hiebert in Transforming Worldviews.