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Christian OET as it existed then and shared a common purpose—native non-Christian communities had to convert or die.
At the very least, serious efforts were invested by Christian European missionaries to map local traditions and deities onto Christianity to reconcile the two and gradually ease the native into the coloniser’s religion.
The first was, of course, to spread the word of the Gospel and the second was to acquire the land of indigenous populations.
The Europeanisation and Christianisation of native populations was accelerated and cemented by the fact that the coloniser actively wielded both the stick and the carrot.
Had it not been for archaeological and ethnological studies, it would have been next to impossible to reconstruct native life as it existed in precolonial times or the genocides perpetrated by the coloniser.
Importantly, be it the Americas or Africa or Asia, the replacement or dilution of indigenous faith systems by the European coloniser’s religion had an adverse bearing on the sacred relationship between indigenous societies and their land, and consequently with nature.
when the European coloniser arrived in North America, there were close to 2,000 cultural groups that had their own lifestyles, languages, beliefs and customs.
This ability to think as a species that is not removed from nature, and to simultaneously preserve and celebrate the cultural diversity within, is of immense relevance to several contemporary debates where discussions around social cohesion and ‘unity’ are loaded with an overbearing
In his book The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian, Joseph Epes Brown,5 scholar of Native American traditions, observed that despite their diversity, the Amerindian peoples lived ‘a metaphysic of nature’, wherein each group spelled out in great detail the roles and responsibilities of the members of the community.
followers of certain Indic schools of philosophy can relate to the beliefs of the Siouan culture as depicted by Brown in his book The Sacred Pipe.11
For instance, an old woman would be addressed as ‘mother’ and a much older woman as ‘grandmother’. Such an approach to human relations is a direct corollary of the community’s spiritual attitude to nature. All of this changed when Columbus’ Christian expeditionary party landed
Enlightenment whose emphasis on Christianity’s Cartesian dualistic approach to humans and nature that advanced the idea of superiority of the ‘rational human mind’ over ‘non-rational nature’. This paved the way for the conquest of nature by the ‘superior’ human.
‘radical uncoupling of the cultural and the social from nature’18 at the doors of the Enlightenment which, he believed, spurred the colonial project of reordering nature to serve human needs.
The ‘modern’, ‘rational’, ‘scientific’, Christian European coloniser could not get himself to acknowledge that the lived experience and traditional knowledge of native societies gathered over millennia could teach him more than a thing or two about living in harmony with nature as opposed to merely salvaging what remained of it in the name of ‘sustainable’ development.
One of its objectives was to keep the knowledge within the community, so that it was accessible only to those who understood both its meaning and, importantly, its sanctity.
European coloniser deifies its central scripture as the ‘Word of God’ given its revelatory treatment. Therefore, only that which was contained in their scripture or the Book was deemed to be true, making the colonisers the People of the Book.
The absence of written records made it more convenient for the coloniser to erase native histories after destroying or appropriating their sacred spaces.
The Christian coloniser was acutely alive to the fact that language captured a culture’s journey and reflected it through its stories, idioms, proverbs and usages, which connected the speaker with the collective past.
While some scholars have interpreted the use of the coloniser’s language to keep the native culture alive as a form of ‘creative resistance’ on the part of indigenous colonised communities,23 in my view, such an interpretation is, at best, human optimism at work.
The colonial intent behind linguistic policies were equally reflective
education was perhaps one of the most potent tools for cultural Europeanisation of indigenous peoples.
Education was expressly employed to ‘shape the political, social, cultural, and economic direction of the colonies’25 and was designed to reinforce and reproduce racist structures.
social engineering and subservience of the native society was embedded in the curriculum since the coloniser was aware of its power to ‘shape the economic, social and political futures of students’.
Colonial curriculum was often imported from either Britain or North America, and was designed to produce Africans who would always consider themselves inferior in their interactions with Europeans, and would take pride in serving the interests
Impressionable young Africans were being taught that a ‘civilised’ African was one who assimilated into European culture.
On the rare occasion that ‘exceptional’ African students were offered access to an ‘academic curriculum’, the medium of instruction was English,
even the academic curriculum would be centred on Europe and North America, which were portrayed as ‘modern’ and ‘developed’, while African countries were shown as being ‘traditional’ and ‘backward
Mandela was acutely aware of the fact that the purpose of colonial education in educating people like him was to create a new ‘Black elite’ in Africa that looked up to the coloniser and his way of life.
one was taught to serve, the other to rule, which was the vision of the coloniser—to colonialise the colonised society.
In Africa—which was divided up between the European colonisers, such as Britain, France, Germany and Belgium, through the 1884 Belgium Conference—education was taken up by missionaries, merchants and colonial governments.
The transgenerational trauma inflicted by Christian missionaries who accompanied the coloniser and who were responsible for running colonial schools was immeasurable.
To cut a long story short, colonial education annihilated a society’s belief in itself. It made the colonised people see their past as one vast wasteland of non-achievement and it made them desirous of distancing themselves from that wasteland, and instead identify with an entity that was furthest removed from them—European culture.
European coloniality was directly responsible for disrupting the sacred relationship between indigenous peoples and nature, the destruction of their faith, language, political and societal structures and knowledge—in short, their entire culture.
This led to what the scholars have termed ‘psychocultural marginality’,41 wherein loss of cultural identity results in social and individual disorganisation which manifests as ‘low self-esteem, extreme poverty, oppression, depression, loss of identity, substance abuse, violence, lower life expectancy, low educational attainment, limited employment, poor housing and ill health’.42 It is a continuing state of limbo wherein the natives are neither capable of subscribing to the culture of the coloniser nor going back to their own roots,
It was this determination that gave colonised societies the strength and confidence needed to aspire for political independence, which was also partly a consequence of colonial education backfiring on the coloniser.
As we shall see, the manifestation of ‘secularised’ coloniality remains most rampant in the political, legal and religious spheres, which reflects in the misplaced sense of pride that several decolonised nations draw as inheritors of a ‘common law tradition’, or being part of the ‘commonwealth of civilised nations’ or as the ‘beneficiaries of the Magna Carta’. This includes internalisation of that most fundamental of European political conceptions, ‘nation-statehood’, and its attendant trappings.
non-Christian New World through its Cartesian dualist/humanist prism;
sense of anthropological superiority created a race consciousness that spawned the global imperial exercise to civilise the soulless heathen natives by replacing the entirety of their cultures with the European’s.
in those lands which were not conducive for settlement but were rich in resources, institutions that facilitated the process of rent-seeking and expropriation of resources through the purchased or coerced aid of local rulers were set up.
The British Indian army was organised on religious and caste lines, again pointing to the coloniser’s racial approach not just to religion but also to caste.
Those that converted to Christianity clearly enjoyed greater representation in the colonial administration, such as in the case of the Christian Sinhalese in British Ceylon.
Similarly, on the economic front, stereotypes relating to occupational specialisations were reinforced and made further rigid through colonial policies, thereby interfering with the organic flow of the native society’s sociocultural dynamics.
thanks to their participation in the colonial administration as well as through colonial education, both of which covered the praxis and theory of colonial political thought.
it needs to be underscored that the secularisation of the Christian onto-episteme is the consequence of obscuring the source of a certain thought and focusing exclusively on its outward expression.5
