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 4  Reading the Colonizer’s Mind Lord Lugard and the Philosophical Foundations of British Colonialism Of the two components of the colonial whole, the colonized and the colonizer, much attention has been directed at the situation of the colonized. Few attempts have been made to go behind the mind of the colonizer. Of course, I am aware of historical studies, biographies, and such like that do. However, the pickings are very slim when it comes to examinations of the ideas that inform colonial practice.1 It is time to take seriously the other component of the colonial totality: the colonizer. After all, as both Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi so eloquently tell us in their works, there would have been no colonized had there been no colonizer. This acclaimed symbiosis between the colonizer and the colonized underscores the inadequacy of not taking seriously the need to unearth the motivations behind the colonizer ’s activity. The colonizer is itself a whole with several determinations. Albert Memmi identifies three such determinations: “a colonial, a colonizer and the colonialist.”2 Fanon, too, never failed to point out the many demographic and other groupings in the ranks of the colonizer. For our purposes, though, I focus on other possible determinations of the colonizer whole as identified in chapter 2: missionaries, administrators , and traders. The man whose views are analyzed in this chapter belongs to the second category. The character of colonialism and its principal lineaments were fashioned by administrators, and this is why it is important for us to make sense of their views and, where available, their justifications for them. Additionally, acquainting ourselves with those views might enable us to make better sense of the policy options discernible in the practice of colonialism. It is an unargued assumption of this chapter that those views had such consequences. However odious the views held by the colonizers, however much they discomfit us, we ignore them only at our own peril insofar as they had consequences for colonial practice. We saw in chapter 2 that the early missionaries did quite well in implementing various items on their program of civilization. Unfortunately, their administrator and trader successors never implemented this program on any scale. One may cite Reading the Colonizer’s Mind 129 the dynamics of the evangelizing missions themselves and their relative penuriousness to explain the absence of implementation on a grand scale, but one must consider the machinations of the other constituents of the colonizer component of the colonial totality: traders and administrators. Traders wanted new markets and new sources for raw materials, and in their search for both aided the missionaries for a time in the latter’s quest for native souls. They let missionaries travel on their ships, and from time to time they shared stations and victuals with itinerant preachers. But this class of colonizers is not the focus of my interest here, for missionaries and traders both ultimately yielded to the last arrivals to the colonies: administrators. The rest of this chapter is devoted to the examination of the philosophical assumptions that informed the practice of the administrators. Let us sum up the discussion so far. Strange as it may seem, in Britain’s African colonies, the missionaries were the progressives, and the administrators—soldiers, residents, hired guns—were the reactionaries . The missionaries were not only the ones who felt it their duty to bring the native to civilization, they were also the ones who were willing to put in place some of the most important institutions for filtrating modernity into the colonies. So it is easy to see why they were the ones who insisted that the Africans had to abandon their old ways in their entirety and embrace the new ways. I should not be misunderstood; I know that this approach was fraught with danger for the Africans’ engagement with modernity. Yet I also must insist that the revolutionary nature of the missionary enterprise stands out in sharp contrast to the reactionary conservative nature of the administrators’ enterprise. I can cite several indices. Christianity3 recruited from the outcasts, the marginal elements; the administrators’ favored recruits were mostly of chiefly provenance.4 Christianity wanted to wipe the slate clean, to implant new forms of social living, new ways of being human, new ways of seeing the world and of naming it; administrators inaugurated sociocryonics with its attendant consequence of preserving or shaping existing institutions, regardless of their state of health or relevance, to serve their limited needs for low-cost...

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