Short Essay # 3

                                                Summer 2011 HST 498 Short Essay # 3

The European perspective of the African transitioned from a viewpoint of their right of mastery over them during the period of the slave trade to developing mastery over them due to their technological and scientific advances and inventions. The European perspective was founded on  racial bias, formerly this racial bias was based on the biblical right of enslavement and religious assumption that due to God’s allowance for slaves as mentioned in the bible married with the biological differences between white Europeans and black Africans that this made the African the logical subject for enslavement and that enslavement was a means of exposure to Christianity and if converted would save their souls. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the European perspective still maintained superiority over the inferior black African and more so in the light of the thrust in technology that dominated the European commercial world and caused a new set of values by which to judge the black African. These values were key to the ideology of the civilizing mission.

Michael Adas addresses this ideology in his article, “Contested Hegemony: The Great War and the Afro-Asian Assault on the Civilizing Mission Ideology”, he defines the formulation of this ideology coming from colonial administrators and advocates of colonial expansion. They proposed that the civilizing mission would promote good government, economic improvement and Christian proselytization. Adas states that the former gauges of superiority and inferiority such as differences in physical appearance and religious beliefs which dominated the European world view remained instilled in European society. However by the middle of the nineteenth century European thinkers whether they were racists or antiracists, expansionists or anti-imperialists shared the conviction that through their scientific discoveries and inventions Westerners had gained an understanding of the physical world and the ability to tap its resources in a manner which was vastly superior to anything achieved by other peoples, past or present.(pg 32) During the late Victorian era the champions of the civilizing mission saw the colonized people  and cultures as given to fatalistic, passive and excessive emotional behaviors. They regarded Africans and Asians as superstitious, indolent, reactionary, out of control and oblivious to time. These traits exhibited by the colonized people were the foundation by which Western theorists and colonial administrators determined the  inferiority of the colonized people. This value system was overwhelmingly based on bourgeois sentiments. The bourgeoisie esteemed rationality, empiricism, progressivism, systematic inquiry, industriousness and adaptability. Key civilizing mission attributes such as discipline, curiosity, punctuality, honest dealing and taking control were gauges by which the colonized people were judged. To further distort the judgment placed on the Africans, European observers assumed that due to the Africans response of astonishment, awe and mystified reactions of seeing the inventions of the Western world such as motor cars, bicycles, gramophones, telegraphy and the telephone that Africans were racially incapable of rational thought, discipline, scientific investigation and technological innovation.(pg. 39) This misinterpretation was a cause for few opportunities before World War I for colonized Africans to pursue serious training in the sciences, medicine, or engineering, instead they were relegated to the operation and maintenance of the most elementary machines.

In Hallett’s article, “Changing European Attitudes to Africa”, he points out that due to the lack of literacy within Africa, the published works of the exploits of outsiders are richly embellished and is a cause of bias which tends to overstress the importance of external influences which has to be constantly combated with publishing of the achievements of African societies in developing their own varied and elaborate cultures. These European writings which contributed to the European perspective of the African continent may have overemphasized the impact European techniques and institutions had on Africa, especially in comparison to the revolutionary innovations Africa adopted from its contact with Asia over millennia. (pg. 458,459) Hallett states that between 1790 and 1875 a change in European attitudes towards Africa developed in response to a steady expansion of European activities and the growing assurance of European power. In medieval times the technologies and political structures between these two cultures were not so different, however that changed with the rise of advancements in European technology. The European technological revolution caused a gap between the European and African continents which caused Europeans to adopt new attitudes towards people of alien culture whose way of life seemed increasingly different from their own. Two factors now contributed to a change in the European perspective towards Africa, 1) Europeans now contemplated their own societies with a heightened sense of pride, confidence and arrogance when comparing themselves to other parts of the world, and 2) a great increase in the number of Europeans with a stake in Africa and the steady expansion of European activity in the frontiers of the African continent. Each nationality of European involved in some operation in Africa, be it an English missionary, a French army officer, a Greek trader all had a sense of cultural superiority over the indigenous people of Africa. This sense of superiority was perceived by means of judgment using the value system of the European age. Hallett attributes this to the written material provided to the reader at that time which would reflect the way the author felt in response to the success of an agenda, for example a European missionary is likely to show little sympathy for those who reject or revile his teaching. Thus the European theorist found himself free to select those facts that accorded best with his own preconceptions, and by the late eighteenth century there was enough material available on the subject of those African peoples whom Europeans had been in fairly regular contact to allow Europeans with an interest in the issues of race and culture to develop a number of different theories. (pg 473,474)

The African response to European imperialism is documented in the Mackenzie article regarding the partitioning of Africa and as each European nation attempted to stake a claim to Africa’s resources, either a battle ensued between the tribal group of which their territory was in danger, or a treaty or agreement was made between a competing tribe with the European administration who would encroach on another tribes territory. Mackenzie provides a historically detailed account of each area of Africa and the European nation attempting to acquire a partition of this continent, their strategy and affected African state or tribal group’s response to protect their homeland.

The Adi article, Pan-Africanism and West African Nationalism in Britain, is an account of another response to European imperialism with the development of various organizations whose purpose was to promote solidarity, a sense of identity and nationalism among those in the diaspora and in Africa. According to Adi during the entire period of slavery and colonial rule West Africans have been compelled to leave their homeland either from forced migration of slavery, looking for employment or educational opportunities and arriving in Britain. The Africans had to endure the effects of racism in Britain and thus moved Africans in Britain and in the diaspora to create organizations such as the West African Student’s Union, the West African National Secretariat, the African Association and the Ethiopian Association to name a few. 

Thus the European perspective did change due to a response to their own commercial successes from the technological and scientific advancements which increased the expansion of imperialism. The European now looked at the colonized people with an ethnocentric world view motivated by the pride and power of imperialism as opposed to the religiously based racial ideologies of former centuries.