We all know that the violence of colonisation was justified, by its perpetrators, as part of a ‘civilising mission’. What we tend not to grasp is that one of the key goals of this mission was to eradicate animist thought. The object was to turn the colonised into dualists – to colonise not only lands and bodies, but minds. As the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has put it: ‘Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the
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