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 2  Running Aground on Colonial Shores The Saga of Modernity and Colonialism In the previous chapter, I showed how colonialism in Africa was also a system of philosophical exclusions. Dominated as it was by these exclusions, colonialism in Africa unfolded along a particular trajectory that many analysts considered inevitable . But I would like to argue that it is false that colonialism could only have unfolded in Africa in the way that it did. The history of colonialism could have unfolded differently. If we are to reappraise the history of colonialism in Africa, we need to identify the road not taken.1 The colonial whole had two moments: the colonizer and the colonized. Each of these entities was itself a unity with several parts. When we speak of the colonizer in Africa, we may mean any one of three possible (but by no means exhaustive) membership categories: missionaries, administrators, and traders.2 These categories are not exhaustive because there were others in the colonial situation who provided what one might call the support infrastructure for the colonial enterprise: wives of colonial officials and other groups of women,3 self-employed artisans who migrated to the colonies to seek better fortunes, or adventurers of different sorts who, sometimes at great embarrassment to their fellows in the colonizer class, had a proclivity for “going native”—that is, mixing with the natives and mimicking their ways. Nor should one expect that each category is clearly and sharply delineated from the other. At various times, the membership of one category overlapped with another. What is important is to take seriously the divergences in the colonial situation and how, within what on the whole was a more or less unified world view, there were significant variations that had implications for how the entire enterprise evolved from one time to another. The views of the members of each of these categories were not always convergent; often they were clearly at variance. It is important to study the various orientations among the different membership categories. What is indisputable is that how colonialism evolved and what its specific contours were were determined by the administrators, among whom must be listed soldiers who led the military expeditions against the native communities and traders, many of whom served as the initial administrators before the home government began to take a more direct interest in the fortunes of the colonies. Differ- 50 Colonialism ent individuals and groups among the colonizers had different opinions about how necessary it was to bring the fruit of civilization to the natives. And the rewards or consequences that each individual or group expected did not necessarily tally with those of the others. For illustration, traders were interested in finding new markets for their products , new sources of raw materials, and new places to invest in for maximum profits . Some administrators, many of whom started out as adventurers and hired guns for the companies, were motivated by the love of country that made them want to stake out new territories as a way of enhancing the conditions of their citizens and thereby the national prestige of their countries.4 Missionaries, on the other hand, especially at the beginning, were seized by the injunction to spread the Gospel and harvest native souls.5 A by-product of this endeavor included disseminating Christian civilization (which by then was indistinguishable from modernity) in native lands. Hence they set sail. Many ships never reached shore. The cargoes of those that did included not only victuals, navigation equipment, and other items but also substantial ideological war chests, ideational templates for remaking native minds, creating new native men and women, and altering the ways of life of those domiciled on native shores. It was this business of social transformation that ultimately unraveled; its abortion is the shipwreck alluded to in the title of this chapter. Had the program of social transformation not come unstuck, the history of Africa might have been different today. And as speculative as this may seem, it is neither idle nor groundless.6 It is customary to talk loosely of the westernization of various Africans and the impact of Western values on native culture. However, the reality is much different. The business of transposing modernity to native shores is not an exception. Contrary to the dominant wisdom that laments how Western values have distorted native cultures, the relationship between indigenous cultures and colonialism was a lot more complex. Yes, there was distortion. But there was another dimension under which, in...

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